[HN Gopher] G7 nations committing billions more to fossil fuel t...
___________________________________________________________________
G7 nations committing billions more to fossil fuel than green
energy
Author : ciconia
Score : 281 points
Date : 2021-06-02 07:47 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| cbmuser wrote:
| "Green energy" needs fossile fuels such as natural gas as backup
| power plants.
|
| If you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions effectively, you
| must support nuclear power.
|
| France went the nuclear path and their energy sector causes 50
| million tons of CO2 per year.
|
| Germany went the renewable path and their annual energy sector
| emissions are about 300 million tons of CO2.
|
| They were a bit less in both countries due to Covid-19 causing
| shutdowns of industries.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > If you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions effectively,
| you must support nuclear power.
|
| Very strong statement but no evidence whatsoever.
|
| Germany's a bad example, we're (that is: the government during
| the last 16 years) doing a lot to keep really old crappy coal
| power plants running and slow the transformation towards
| renewables. And still, 50% of the electricity is produced by
| renewables.
| legulere wrote:
| You also need gas for peaking power plants if you use nuclear
| for the base load.
|
| France has a huge problem having to replace crumbling nuclear
| power plants with new ones being too expensive and too slow to
| build.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| Doesn't the enrichment of uranium require a lot of power?
| Nuclear is not as carbon free as they lead you to believe.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The old gaseous diffusion enrichment process plants were very
| inefficient. You may be thinking of those. They're not used
| today in the West. (I'm not sure if Russia or China still
| operates such plants.) The last French plant closed in 2012
| and the last American plan closed in 2013 [1]. Commercial
| centrifuge enrichment, a much more efficient process, started
| in the 1970s [2]. That's what enriches uranium for power
| reactor fuel today.
|
| That said, even with gaseous diffusion enrichment, nuclear
| power had much lower life cycle emissions per megawatt hour
| than any fossil generating source. Nothing is 100% "carbon
| free" over its full life cycle but nuclear power and
| renewables both have very low emissions compared to fossil
| combustion [3].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaseous_diffusion#Current_s
| tat...
|
| [2] https://www.urenco.com/about/history
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-
| cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
| adrianN wrote:
| Those fossil fuel backup power plants can eventually be run
| with Methane generated from CO2, water, and electricity.
| throwawayzRUU6f wrote:
| I'm surprised why this path isn't discussed as a viable
| option forward, especially given how much attention is given
| to hydrogen, despite mountains of likely insurmountable
| engineering challenges that surround H2.
|
| Production of natural gas is a somewhat inefficient, but
| infinitely scalable battery for renewables.
|
| My cynical take is that there's no hype to be generated
| around power-to-natural-gas, and people hyping up hydrogen
| don't want the public to know that most of originates from
| breaking fossil fuels.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I think the reason is a lot similar: any time we strip the
| oxygen from C20 that's carbon capture, and we aught to
| rebury the stuff.
|
| These biofuels only look good when one forgets we need to
| put a lot of carbon back into the ground, and the latter is
| already one of the most expensive parts of the transition.
|
| biofuels for air transport make sense, simply because there
| might be no alternative, and in conjunction with basically
| limiting air travel to trans-oceanic routes. But it
| absolutely doesn't make sense for electricity generation.
| adrianN wrote:
| This path is in fact being discussed. Power2Gas for
| seasonal storage is a key part of all plans for
| decarbonization that I'm aware of. There are already a
| number of demo P2G plants in operation.
| throwawayzRUU6f wrote:
| > Power2Gas for seasonal storage is a key part of all
| plans for decarbonization that I'm aware of
|
| That's my understanding, too; amongst the technocrats and
| field-experts, power-to-gas is taken very seriously.
| However, amongst the public and the press, even the pop-
| science press, it's scarcely ever mentioned. Hydrogen,
| batteries, biofuels, carbon capture, and even fusion all
| enjoy vastly more attention. I cannot think of any
| explanation that wouldn't be cynical or sinister
| adrianN wrote:
| The press has never been particularly good at talking
| about climate change.
| novaRom wrote:
| Nuclear power is introducing lots of long-lived fission
| products into environment by slowly poisoning our biosphere.
|
| Right now the United States has at least 108 sites designated
| as areas that are contaminated and unusable, sometimes many
| thousands of acres.
|
| Events like Chernobyl and Fukushima will certainly happen again
| and again.
| oblio wrote:
| There are new nuclear plant designs that aren't really being
| given a chance.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| > slowly poisoning our biosphere
|
| Relative to what! Coal power plans spew out more radiation.
| You could screw over just one km^3 of earth putting all our
| waste there for hundreds of years. Localizing the damage like
| that is almost incomparably better.
| titzer wrote:
| > Nuclear power is introducing lots of long-lived fission
| products into environment by slowly poisoning our biosphere.
|
| Nuclear waste from power generation is solid. A typical plant
| products 3 cubic meters of solid waste per year, which is
| stored on-site in cooling pools. Compare that to hundreds of
| thousands of tons per plant of radioactive fly ash just
| spewed into the atmosphere and millions of tons of CO2.
| You're going to need a citation for the "108 contaminated
| sites that are unusable." Also a thousand acres is a little
| over a square mile; again, which I doubt. That is absolutely
| not how waste is managed in the US, and leaks like that do
| _not_ happen.
|
| And if you want to talk about slowly poisoning the biosphere,
| stop with the anti-nuclear hype and start talking about
| microplastics and pesticides.
| silvester23 wrote:
| For now that may be true, does not mean it will stay that way
| forever.
|
| Although I agree that in order to significantly reduce CO2
| emissions in the short term, nuclear power seems like the best
| option right now.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| > "Germany went the renewable path and their annual energy
| sector emissions are about 300 million tons of CO2."
|
| Not really. They held on hard to gas and coal power. Of the
| latter, a disturbing amount is still based on lignite or brown
| coal, which is more accurately described as "somewhat
| combustible dirt".
|
| Germany is not nearly as dedicated to green energy as they
| would like the world to think. They shut down their nuclear
| sector due to fear, and primarily replaced it with more fossil
| energy.
|
| I do agree that nuclear power is something we should be more
| positive towards, but that does not invalidate renewable energy
| sources.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| OK. What about non-G7 nations?
| dahjkol wrote:
| They don't matter. Duh.
| rocknor wrote:
| True, other large non-G7 nations like Australia and Saudi
| Arabia that also have very high consumption-driven emissions
| per capita should also be called out.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
| woutr_be wrote:
| Is there a chart to see how much they committed to both fossil
| fuel and green energy over time? These two numbers by itself
| don't really tell me anything.
|
| But if let's say fossil fuel commitment has gone down, while
| green energy goes up, then that's a different, more positive
| story.
| adamsvystun wrote:
| This article is a little misleading when it includes aviation
| industry bailouts as "fossil fuel commitments". Not only this is
| an indirect connection, but also there is no green air travel
| (for now). Regardless of your opinion on the necessity of the
| bailouts, the thought behind them was not to further tip the
| scales towards fossil fuel, but to help out the aviation industry
| in their country.
| rapht wrote:
| "A little misleading" ??
|
| I'd rather call it blatantly opinionated... taking to its full
| conclusion the logic of considering commitments (i.e. money
| alloted) through the way energy is consumed instead of the way
| energy is produced (the fuel you put into the plane's reactors
| was not produced by the plane, was it?), you may as well say
| that any natalist policy is a commitment towards fossil fuels
| because humans in the end consume fossil fuels. Tautology at
| its best.
| dieortin wrote:
| Humans don't require fossil fuels to function, but planes do.
| When you give money to an airline so it can keep its planes
| flying, that directly translates into emissions.
| aembleton wrote:
| But humans do need heating that largely comes from fossil
| fuels and fertilisers to grow enough food to eat which also
| come from fossil fuels.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Fertilizer usage usually does not contribute to
| greenhouse gas "emissions", at least directly.
| boringg wrote:
| Actually fertilizer does through N2O emissions.
| anon321321323 wrote:
| perhaps they should put some extra expenses for when pilots
| dump fuel because they're overweight?
| dahjkol wrote:
| I wonder if blimps or zeppelin is the future for "green"
| aviation
| pfdietz wrote:
| They are actually too inefficient.
|
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/helium-
| hokum...
| adamsvystun wrote:
| I think electric airplanes are still the more probable
| future. My understanding of the current problem is that the
| weight to energy ratio in electric batteries is still too
| high for useful flights. But this ratio is improving year by
| year, and very soon we will be near the number where electric
| aircrafts will be competitive with fossil fuel ones on some
| types of flights.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, there is no significant effort on
| battery-powered airliners in the industry. The only
| significant bets are on hydrogen and biofuels.
| oblio wrote:
| The energy density of kerosene absolutely destroys Amy
| battery tech we have and kerosene is used up, therefore
| making the aircraft lighter over time, further increasing
| range.
|
| Mainstream commercial electric aviation is probably a half
| a century away (provided we don't actually discover
| something even better that supercedes it).
| paganel wrote:
| The future is probably to only allow the middle-class and the
| well-off people to fly again, the tickets costing 5 or 10
| pounds from London to the likes of Prague or Malaga that used
| to be so popular among the young and the low and low-middle-
| classes will probably be a thing of the past.
|
| The same goes for personal cars, the governments are all too
| happy to give money directly to the high-middle-classes so
| that they could buy EVs costing north of 40,000 euros while
| imposing very high taxes (when not banning them altogether)
| for 10 to 15-year old SH cars favoured by the low and low-
| middle classes (because that's all that they can afford).
|
| The Financial Times has had a really interesting article [1]
| on this a couple of days ago from the perspective of those
| high-middle class people, some of them are worried that the
| low and low-middle-class people will revolt once put in front
| of these new realities (like the Gilets Jaunes have done in
| France), but imo they will most probably do nothing of the
| sort.
|
| [1] https://archive.is/H03ng
| oblio wrote:
| If tickets will be that cheap, why wouldn't poor people
| travel, too?
|
| Edit: Nevermind, misread.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| They are that cheap now and relatively poor people
| travel.
| dieortin wrote:
| I think he said the opposite, tickets won't be that cheap
| anymore.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| I suspect that the only way for long-distance, heavy-lift
| aviation (and military aviation) to continue operating in a
| political/economic climate that demands CO2
| reduction/elimination will be via biodiesel. Batteries ain't
| gonna do it. Zeppelins might be way forward for freight
| traffic where slow doesn't (often) matter as much, but for
| large scale passenger transport (again: assuming it's to
| survive) I don't see anything approaching the specific-energy
| embodied in diesel. Fischer-Tropsch (sp?) is well understood
| and can be made to work with pretty-much any feedstock.
| dieortin wrote:
| What about hydrogen?
| mikro2nd wrote:
| I've been advocating Hydrogen for energy
| storage/transport for decades, but I don't think it works
| for planes. Specific energy (energy per kg) is against
| it, I'm afraid. It's not the H2 that weighs much, but
| it's such a sneaky/leaky gas that containment vessels end
| up weighing quite a lot. (Maybe there have been
| improvements in the past decade or so - it's been about
| that long since I looked.) Hydride storage can't deliver
| the H2 fast enough for aircraft (again, unless there've
| been some advances) and we'll not even speak of the
| flammability issue ;)
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Many large companies in the aviation industry are
| investing hard on it though. For example:
| https://www.airbus.com/innovation/zero-
| emission/hydrogen/zer...
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Since the Hindenburg disaster, hydrogen zeppelins have gone
| out of style. Probably rightly so. What non-flammable
| levitating gas we are left with is helium. Never mind that
| helium appears to be going up in price, it has twice the
| density of hydrogen and hence, is far less efficient. So i
| think zeppelins are basically dead, except for short,
| recreational flights.
| loudmax wrote:
| I could see a use for hydrogen filled drone zeppelins
| carrying cargo. Cargo typically doesn't need to travel as
| quickly as people do and we can take risks with cargo that
| we wouldn't take with people.
|
| Also, I have a feeling that hydrogen got a
| disproportionally bad reputation after Hindenburg. After
| all, people do travel in devices that are loaded with
| gasoline and jet fuel, so it's not like it isn't possible
| to safely handle flammable material.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I don't know about you but i just have a nightmarish
| vision in my head of thousands of self - propelled
| incendiary devices flying around and setting cities and
| countrysides ablaze. Shudder. No thanks.
|
| And your comparison of zeppelins to cars and planes is
| flawed. The former consists chiefly of an extremely
| flammable gas. Protecting it is a thin layer of canvas
| (which can also burn). The latter contain a relatively
| small container of liquid which is protected by layers of
| solid metal and foam and all kinds of valves.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I would love to see some real investment into them once
| again, for energy efficiency they can't be beat
| darrenf wrote:
| There's a UK company which is hoping to launch regular
| airship services for short routes within the next 5 years:
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/26/airships-
| for-c...
| birktj wrote:
| Are they competitive with cars/trains though. In the
| article linked by the sibling it says the Airlander can
| reach speeds of 50 knots. That is probably fine for a
| cruise-ship type experience, but for actually going
| anywhere a well designed train network seems like it would
| be much more effective?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Can you elaborate on why that is misleading? You say it
| yourself, that entire industry runs 100 % on fossil fuels.
| adamsvystun wrote:
| Sure, I found this misleading because whether the entire
| industry is running on fossil fuels or on green electricity
| is orthogonal to the bailouts. The bailouts where concerned
| (at least according to the proponents) about job loss in the
| aviation industry. So these bailouts are neutral in terms of
| fossil fuels. They do not encourage or discourage the use of
| fossil fuels.
|
| Getting into the article, I expected something more direct,
| like for example if they passed car gas subsidies.
| Phenomenit wrote:
| Then subsidies to prop up markets like agricultural don't
| affect supply and demand?
| adamsvystun wrote:
| Let me first check if I understand your argument
| correctly: You are saying that my argument is wrong
| because subsidies to something like agriculture while
| also not directly encouraging fossil fuel usage, can
| potentially increase the CO2 output overall. Because
| subsidies are changing (lowering) prices, so they
| influence the behaviour of customers.
|
| I partially agree. If your subsidies are helping parts of
| the agriculture that are more polluting than the industry
| average, then you are increasing the environmental
| pollution.
|
| But this does not apply to my argument for 2 reasons: 1.
| I am talking about bailouts. They rather don't influence
| the long-term prices of flights. They are one time thing,
| intended to help some companies not die. 2. Even the
| agriculture subsidies you mention I would not call
| "fossil fuel commitments", which is misleading. Better
| name for them is something like "subsidies that encourage
| pollution" or "subsidies that encourage increase CO2
| emissions".
| Phenomenit wrote:
| First of all I appreciate the time you've taken to answer
| my question but I still have to disagree with you that
| bailing out the air transportation industry doesn't have
| long lasting effect on our Co to emissions and it is not
| compatible with a sustainable development. The bailouts
| are used in the same way as in the agricultural sector.
| They're used to protect domestic capabilities the
| environment be damned.
| Maakuth wrote:
| Wouldn't most of the fossil fuel commitments match this
| description, that the thought behind them isn't primarily to
| tip the scales. For example the car industry lifelines: the
| primary idea is presumably to save the jobs instead of
| supporting fossil fuels. I mean people and businesses mostly
| don't burn fossil fuels for the joy of it.
| adamsvystun wrote:
| I did not include car industry lifelines in my comment
| because of this. You can help electric car manufactures more
| than fossil fuel ones and vice versa.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| The car industry will be the electric car manufacturers.
| iicc wrote:
| Pollution is by definition a side effect and 'an indirect
| connection'.
| adamsvystun wrote:
| You are correct. But: 1. The article uses the term "fossil
| fuel commitments" and not "pollution" 2. Air industry
| bailouts are not necessarily increasing pollution compared to
| pre-pandemic levels.
| dieortin wrote:
| But they're increasing pollution compared to not carrying
| out those bailouts.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| However, those bailouts could have been tied to limiting short-
| distance flights. At least in Europe, trains are a good
| alternative for many short-distance flights.
| adamsvystun wrote:
| Yes, this is correct. If you (somehow) tie the bailouts to
| limiting short-distance flights, than your bailouts are
| becoming more environmentally friendly.
|
| But again, doing regular bailouts is not necessarily tipping
| the scales in the anti-environmentally friendly direction.
| They can be neutral. They are neutral if they did not change
| the behaviour in relative flight usage comparatively to
| before the pandemic.
|
| Using this reasoning for example will make flight subsidies
| anti-environmentally friendly and not neutral (if you also do
| not subsidies other modes of transportation).
|
| Obviously this is hard to judge, but the article (from what I
| can tell) does not study that, so I wrote " _a little_
| misleading ".
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > If you (somehow) tie the bailouts to limiting short-
| distance flights, (...)
|
| I think that's what France did?
|
| > Using this reasoning for example will make flight
| subsidies anti-environmentally friendly and not neutral
|
| We have to reduce CO2 emissions by 7% a year (Germany,
| according to the IPCC). So besides laws and regulation, I'd
| argue that a crisis and the subsequently necessary bailouts
| are a good chance to force companies to do more. Before
| going bankrupt, they'd probably agree to the deal.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| It's a decade too late for mitigation. It's time for adaption.
| Let's start building flood defenses and all plan to move up hill
| and pole-ward.
| thendrill wrote:
| If we cared about the environment we would just stop buying
| coffee, chocolate and bananas.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Exhibit A demonstrating how climate lobby has abysmally failed
| in educating the public.
|
| Buying bananas has no relevance to climate. Minimise eating
| meat, minimise use of cars and planes, and get a green energy
| supplier. That cuts your carbon footprint by half (depending
| where you are and what you do)
|
| Other measures don't do much
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Eating less meat won't do anything, it's a fruitless endeavor
| that only makes vegetarians/vegans feel morally superior.
| Everyone in the US could stop eating meat, and it would only
| reduce emissions by a couple percentage points.
|
| Focus on reducing fossil fuel usage.
| dieortin wrote:
| That's not true. I'm no vegetarian, but meat production is
| extremely inefficient and polluting.
|
| It's not about anyone feeling superior.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I dont know why you have an axe to grind with vegans, but
| eating meat causes massive amount of carbon, this is well
| researched
|
| http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-carbon-footprint-diet
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| YT channel What I've Learned goes in-depth into inflated
| carbon footprints like these and can explain it more
| concise than I can.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g
| bhelkey wrote:
| The author summarizes their video's main points:
|
| >(1) The proposed effects on GHG emissions if people went
| meatless are overblown.
|
| >(2) The claims about livestock's water usage are
| misleading.
|
| >(3) The claims about livestock's usage of human edible
| feed are overblown.
|
| >(4) The claims about livestock's land use are
| misleading.
|
| >(5) We should be fixing food waste, not trying to cut
| meat out of the equation.
|
| www.patreon.com/posts/51285771
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Holy shit, I had no idea he went to this level of detail
| to refute criticisms on his video. My respect grows for
| him every day.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Nope. Meat farming is a huge source of greenhouse gases,
| especially methane from cows.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Methane from cows is a fraction of total methane
| emissions, and that itself is a fraction of greenhouse
| gas emissions. Let's instead focus on total food wastage.
| If we quantified food waste as a country, it'd be the 3rd
| largest country. That's mindbogglingly ridiculous.
|
| http://www.fao.org/3/bb144e/bb144e.pdf
| nob0dyasked wrote:
| Stop breathing and that will reduce C02 emissions! That's the
| most important thing in life!
| titzer wrote:
| > Other measures don't do much
|
| Don't have children.
| alva wrote:
| > Buying bananas has no relevance to climate
|
| Can you explain why? All the bananas in my UK supermarket are
| flown from Africa.
|
| > minimise use of cars and planes
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Sorry, should have included the link and explanation:
| basically growing food is energy intensive, but
| transporting food by ship is actually very efficient.
|
| This results in a paradox where locally grown food, if it
| needs additional lights, spraying, ploughing, etc. is worse
| for the environment than food grown in perfect climage and
| transported to you.
|
| https://freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-
| loca...
| PeterisP wrote:
| Some sources e.g. http://www.fao.org/world-banana-
| forum/projects/good-practice... assert that ~2/3 of
| banana GHG footprint is caused by transportation and
| storage, including things like refrigeration on ship.
|
| It's probably still more efficient (both money-wise and
| GHG-wise) than growing bananas locally in UK; now _that_
| would need a lot of extra energy; but on the other hand
| it would be more efficient to eat food that normally
| grows locally in your climate instead of bananas.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Ofcourse that's true, but no-one is (or at least should
| be) eating multiple kilos of bananas, coffee and
| chocolate. They are not a staple food like meat and
| potatoes.
|
| All I am trying to say is that in the total carbon
| footprint of a person, they account for a miniscule part
| of the whole, and that things like a well insulated
| house, transport, etc. will be vastly more important
| McDyver wrote:
| The current consumerist economy is based on scarcity.
|
| Green energy (by definition, sustainable) should be anything but
| scarce, and therefore would allow "weaker" countries to be more
| self-reliant.
|
| This will never be allowed by countries that want to keep their
| "G"-whatever denomination
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| Interesting theory. Do you have examples of the things the "G"
| countries do to keep "weaker" countries from investing in
| renewables?
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Energy may not be scarce, but energy collection devices and
| energy storage devices are.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| However, they are incredibly cheap nowadays.
| emteycz wrote:
| And the nature these "green" solar panels are built on is
| scarce too.
| adrianN wrote:
| No it isn't. In Germany for example we have 2.4 million
| hectares reserved for "energy crops", i.e. mostly large
| monocultures of corn and canola. If we instead used that
| area for solar panels, a large fraction of Germany's
| primary power consumption could be covered.
| emteycz wrote:
| It's not as easy as merely comparing two numbers. Biomes
| are unique and contain unique ecosystems - both of which
| are being destroyed forever.
| belinder wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance but what happens during the night
| when there is no sun? Would the day produce enough to
| last throughout the night with batteries? Are there
| enough batteries?
| adrianN wrote:
| When I say "most of the primary energy requirements are
| satisfied above" I mean averaged over a year, where a
| square meter of solar panel produces about 150Wp and has
| a capacity factor of 11%, i.e. a square meter of solar
| panel produces around 130kWh/a. 2.4 million hectares
| would produce around 3200TWh per year, Germany consumes
| around 4000 TWh per year. These are of course just rough
| ballpark estimates.
|
| You probably want to diversify into wind too to reduce
| storage requirements. IIRC wind also produces a bit more
| power per square meter in Germany than solar. Right now
| there isn't enough storage to cover the windstill nights,
| but there are no technical reasons why we can't store the
| power either in batteries, as Hydrogen or Methane, as
| heat, or, where geography permits, in pumped hydro (or a
| combination of different storage technology). It's just a
| bit expensive right now.
| poxwole wrote:
| Well you couldn't find a bigger collection of hypocrites than a
| G7 summit except perhaps at WEF summit
| andrepd wrote:
| Honestly I consider that properly pricing externalities might be
| the #1 priority we need to change _right now_. Nevermind all the
| castastrophes and loss of freedom brought by capitalism. Without
| charging private interests the true costs of their activity,
| allowing them to pocket the profits and spread the losses,
| markets are _not even in theory_ optimising for utility / social
| good.
|
| A Georgist approach to this would probably alleviate many of the
| most pressing problems of global neoliberal capitalism.
| lenkite wrote:
| Well, the current US president shut down oil and gas drilling
| leases from US public lands. There was a lot of fanfare around
| this.
|
| 2020 was the first year the US exported more petroleum than it
| imported on an annual basis. But due to the sudden federal
| approved decline in 2021, US will now import more oil in 2022.
|
| https://www.worldoil.com/news/2021/2/17/us-will-import-62-mo...
| tchalla wrote:
| The article is a summary of an analysis and I can't find the
| analysis linked in it. I don't know why or how journalists find
| this an acceptable practice.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Here's the report
|
| https://learn.tearfund.org/resources/policy-reports/cleaning...
| voqv wrote:
| Here's the report [0]
|
| IMHO the analysis is muddied by the fact that most G7 countries
| decided to bail out their major Airlines during the pandemic.
| In case of Germany and Italy, those billions of spendings count
| towards a "fossil fuel commitment".
|
| [0]
| https://learn.tearfund.org/-/media/learn/resources/reports/2...
| yorwba wrote:
| I don't think the analysis is publicly available for linking. I
| couldn't find it on any of the listed organizations' websites.
| Maybe they sent a copy directly to the Guardian? The closest
| thing I could find (covering the G7 summit and climate change)
| is this article published yesterday:
| https://odi.org/en/insights/delivering-a-successful-g7-summi...
| gregwebs wrote:
| This graph is a great reality check:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy
|
| Humanity has never displaced an existing energy source with a new
| one. Instead total energy usage grows. Our only success with
| fossil fuel usage reduction is that coal usage is no longer
| growing.
|
| Growing wind, solar, and nuclear by 10x from the 2019 levels
| reported in that data set would put them (as a combination) on
| par with one of the three big existing fossil fuel sources. But
| this can only decrease fossil fuel usage if increased energy
| usage does not take up all those gains as it has always done in
| the past.
|
| I do think though that reducing fossil fuel usage could be
| possible now only because of the shifting demographics of the
| world (most of the world is starting a population decline). The
| counter argument is that a large portion of the world will
| continue to grow economically (increases energy usage) and become
| wealthy enough to start air conditioning and otherwise
| dramatically increase energy usage.
| analognoise wrote:
| "Humanity has never displaced an existing energy source with a
| new one."
|
| I'm having trouble finding whale oil for my vintage lamp...
| spodek wrote:
| Exactly. Tragically, people think individual action doesn't
| achieve anything, but they measure the wrong thing, that one
| person's impact on one or two actions. Our greatest impact is
| in leading others, which multiplies. To lead others we must
| first lead ourselves. My personal actions have led me to
| consult corporate executives, mayors, congressmembers, and
| other influential people.
|
| From the article:
|
| > not yet investing at sufficient scale in technologies that
| support fast decarbonisation of their economies
|
| The most effective "technology" is to consume less. What will
| do that is acting on different values, instead of growth,
| enjoying what we have, instead of efficiency, resilience,
| instead of comfort and convenience, meaning, purpose, and the
| satisfaction of a job well done. Human societies lived with
| those values for hundreds of thousands of years in some cases,
| and centuries in many others, with higher markers of health,
| longevity, stability, and equality than our culture until very
| recently, but those markers are going back down. And will drop
| precipitously if we don't return to those values.
|
| Population growth may be leveling off in the most polluting
| nations, but it's globally growing and over sustainable levels.
| Economically we can sustain population decreasing and many
| nations have lowered birth rates with the opposite of the One
| Child Policy coercion or eugenics, purely voluntary,
| noncoercive, leading to stability, health, and abundance.
|
| > "Every day, we witness the worsening consequences of the
| climate crisis for communities around the world - farmers'
| crops failing; floods and fires engulfing towns and villages;
| families facing an uncertain future."
|
| We can dance around sustainability issues all we want, we
| eventually reach both overpopulation and overconsumption, both
| driven by growth, both driven by cultural beliefs and values we
| can change. This community loves nuclear, but without
| considering your point, that we aren't using new energies to
| replace but to augment. If we ever expect to stop growing and
| instead shrinking our polluting behavior, the sooner the
| better, as in now, which requires leadership more like
| Churchill, Mandela, MLK, and peers, not new technology. It
| costs nothing and improves our lives. When we learn to reduce
| consumption, nuclear will help. With our current values, we'll
| keep growing until hitting its limits, back where we are now,
| but with more people and dependency, making reduction harder.
|
| To quantify all this, I recommend Tom Murphy's book Energy and
| Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, which I wrote about
| https://joshuaspodek.com/the-science-book-of-the-decade-
| ener....
| thehappypm wrote:
| I mean.. in 1800 the main source of power for transportation
| and industry was wind and water. In 1850 it was coal.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Because fossil fuels are the best energy source, absolutely
| smashing the competition circa 1850 and still the top
| contender today.
|
| If we found a comparable energy source today that checked all
| the same boxes as fossil fuels, sans climate change and plus
| energy density, we'd be all over it tomorrow.
| gregwebs wrote:
| But the energy usage increased dramatically. So it is
| possible that the usage of wind power and water power never
| declined much (it would be interesting to see data for this).
| A clearer case might be something like using animal power
| (for plowing and transportation) but I think this idea only
| applies to resources that have a ready and easy to expand
| supply.
| defaultname wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is a "reality check", and it sounds
| suspiciously similar to the "population explosion" claims.
|
| US electricity and gasoline consumption has declined since
| 2010, despite a growing GDP and almost 20 million more people.
| Efficiency and conservation have achieved enormous gains, and
| every renewable source that comes online displaces an existing
| one.
|
| This has occurred across every developed nation. Japan is using
| 20% less energy today than it did in 2000. Germany, France,
| Italy, Canada -- all below 2000.
|
| As developing countries bring more of their population into
| more modern accouterments, of course the total is increasing --
| for now -- but thankfully most are starting with a much greater
| mix of reasonable sources.
| gregwebs wrote:
| I agree that Europe is having real success. But we need to
| also keep in mind where energy is being used the most now and
| in the future. In the long-term Europe going 100% renewable
| by itself doesn't change the global energy picture much.
|
| Displacing a global energy supply in one country keeps the
| resource available and the price lower so that another
| country may use more of it. We may have actual success with
| reducing global coal usage soon since it does not transport
| easily.
|
| I can't find data to back up your claims about the US
| decreasing electricity and gasoline consumption. Do you mean
| per capita? Meanwhile natural gas consumption is increasing.
| I also suspect that the US has outsourced much of our energy
| usage to China in the form of manufacturing. China now uses
| much more energy that the US (although not per capita).
|
| Developing countries may have a head start with renewables
| now, but AFAIK their overall energy usage still implies
| increased fossil fuel usage for the world.
|
| I don't believe this means we are in a hopeless situation. I
| think it means that Europe and the US must prioritize using
| their wealth to further develop the technology for carbon
| neutral energy and to demonstrate it so that it becomes the
| default energy source for the entire world.
| defaultname wrote:
| No, I mean in total. US energy consumption across the board
| has declined. Even in total energy consumption (every
| plane, train, automobile, factory, office, microwave, etc)
| the US is currently about equal with 2000. I mean, it was
| equal before COVID hit, and is measurably lower now (which
| will likely continue as fewer people commute)
|
| 21 years later, with an improving quality of life, and
| almost 50 million extra people (almost 20% more), aggregate
| energy use for the entire nation is static and declining.
| There remain enormous opportunities for efficiency, a lot
| of it simply in normal ongoing modernization.
|
| Wind and solar are already cheaper than any other source
| but natural gas, which itself is a precarious source that
| most nations aren't in a geopolitical situation to rely
| upon.
|
| I find it odd that you question my facts given that there
| is literally nothing that claims otherwise.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
|
| https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
| gregwebs wrote:
| Where are you getting your data from? I see here [1] that
| energy usage is static now (but not since 2000), but it
| is not declining. But that means it is declining per
| capita. But again, I would like to see manufacturing
| outsourcing taken into account.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
| defaultname wrote:
| In 2020, total energy consumption was _significantly_
| below 2010, which was my original claim. In 2020, total
| energy consumption was far below 2000 as well. Total
| energy consumption declined. Continually saying "where
| are your sources" when they're the canonical sources of a
| simple Google search doesn't make my statement untrue.
|
| "But again, I would like to see manufacturing outsourcing
| taken into account."
|
| Groan. This is going down that incredibly boring path
| where someone must "win" however strained and nonsensical
| their argument becomes.
|
| Every developed nation has effectively capped energy
| usage and started to reduce it (despite continuing
| population growth). Every developing nation is starting
| with a much better foundation where they have extremely
| competitive options that aren't the catastrophe that
| prior ones were.
| gregwebs wrote:
| Thanks for editing to cite your sources. They seem to
| show a slight increase in energy usage since 2010. You
| must be using 2020 pandemic data as your comparison which
| is very misleading. But 2018 is the same as 2007, so I
| think it is fair to call energy usage flat.
|
| But the entire point of the chart in my original comment
| is that even if members of the developed world are
| reducing energy usage and lowering carbon emissions
| (which is at best marginally true of the US), the rest of
| the world by definition is more than making up for it
| whether or not they are also using renewables as well.
| [deleted]
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Counterpoint, while it's true we still use things like coal,
| _what_ we do with them has changed massively. Coal in the 1850s
| was all about metal working, steam production (train and ship),
| and home heating, uses that have been almost entirely replaced.
| Coal fired power plants came surprisingly later, with most
| units coming online in America between 1910 and 1950, a time in
| which trains and ships largely went electric or to diesel.
|
| Also, our history of energy production is very short. I'd be
| disinclined to say that it's impossible based on a mere 200
| year sample.
| gregwebs wrote:
| That's not a counterpoint, it is a case in point! There are
| some energy sources like whale oil that had supply issues and
| roughly a single use that got displaced. But for our major
| energy sources with a vast supply we keep finding ways to use
| them in amounts that don't really decrease.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| It's kind of a counterpoint still. We tried and managed to
| replace coal for home heating and transport with something
| else, because coal kind of sucks for those things. The fact
| that coal continued to be used in new ways is a consequence
| of coal dropping in price and there being no real external
| pressure to eliminate coal usage. It's not clear what
| happens once there's strong pressure to eliminate these
| fuels from our economy, because we've never really tried it
| before.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Humanity has never displaced an existing energy source with a
| new one. Instead total energy usage grows. Our only success
| with fossil fuel usage reduction is that coal usage is no
| longer growing.
|
| That is a misrepresentation. The fact that a bunch of other
| people in another country use, say, more biomass now than in
| the past since there are more of them than in the past, does
| not mean that in your country there hasn't been a displacement
| of biomass with, say, coal. And indeed, coal had displaced
| biomass in many countries in the world. And natural gas
| displaced coal in some places.
| gregwebs wrote:
| I agree with your statement. However, we need to keep in mind
| that displacing an energy supply in one country keeps the
| resource available and the price lower so that another
| country may use more of it. We may have real success with
| reducing coal usage soon since it is much less economically
| viable to transport it long distances.
|
| We need to also keep in mind where energy is being used the
| most now and in the future. In the long-term Europe going
| 100% renewable by itself doesn't change the global energy
| picture much. The greater effect is the leading role they
| play demonstrating how it can be done and further developing
| renewable technology.
| boringg wrote:
| Displacing fossil fuel for mobility with green hydrogen +
| electricity will reduce a large portion of those energy
| sources.
|
| Hydrogen for heating + for shipping + heavy duty transit --
| more.
|
| California has already decoupled increasing amounts of
| electricity use and emissions through a combination of policies
| to increase adoption of renewables and through codes and
| standards for home heating/insulation/good build practices.
|
| So while your statement may resonate with some of the past - it
| does not handcuff us to a future trajectory. It is possible to
| change and it is happening - it just needs to happen faster and
| increase in its scale.
|
| Also - we did stop using whale oil in the early 1900s so your
| statement is not 100%.
| gregwebs wrote:
| Whales were going to go extinct so I don't think there was
| much choice. Also it had just one main use at the time for
| oil lamps. That can certainly be disrupted. But if it was a
| plentiful source it may have been possible to figure out how
| to use it more broadly.
|
| I agree that history is not destiny. But in this case only if
| we first understand history.
| FooHentai wrote:
| Random aside, the fantasy world in the Dishonoured games
| series is a parallel version to ours wherein whale oil
| formed the basis for the industrial revolution.
|
| This is I think a riff on the Fallout universe, where the
| transistor was never invented and electronics still bloomed
| via it's predecessor, vacuum tube technology.
| asdff wrote:
| Nixon wanted to have 1000 nuclear power plants operating in the
| U.S. by the year 2000. Today there are 60. Would this law have
| still applied if we followed up with our planned nuclear
| infrastructure?
| gregwebs wrote:
| If we presume that the entire US became gradually powered by
| nuclear (along with solar, wind, and hydro), we probably
| wouldn't have ever seen an actual global decline in fossil
| fuel usage at any point other than perhaps coal by a little.
| Total fossil fuel usage today would be lower though, but this
| would make oil cheaper for the rest of the world which would
| lead to greater oil consumption in the rest of the world than
| what we have historically had. The US would also need to lead
| the rest of the world to adopt nuclear as well.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Humanity has never displaced an existing energy source with
| a new one. Instead total energy usage grows.
|
| Which is why any efforts based on reducing energy use are
| doomed to fail. "Do more with less" sounds great but goes
| against human nature to expand and collect resources. The push
| should always be to make energy cheaper or more green, not to
| curtail energy use. An effort to power air conditioners using
| solar: good, people will get behind that. More efficient air
| conditioners that use less power: great. Telling people they
| must reduce air conditioning and just live in hot: bad, doomed
| to fail. So bring on the solar panels. The mob will support
| you. Just don't tell that mob they must do with less.
| N1H1L wrote:
| Total energy usage has stopped growing for most of the
| developed world for the past decade.
| gregwebs wrote:
| Actually I suspect we need both approaches. But I agree we
| need to both support economic needs and make it not feel like
| extra work to use less energy (although there may be some
| extra up front costs).
| me_me_me wrote:
| Well Germany is closing down their nuclear power plants, under
| excuses of damage and recent Chernobyl series.
|
| While actively funding Nord Stream 2.
|
| So there goes your green EU.
|
| If we are to survive climate change we would have to cull all
| politicians and dirty industry leaders. They have so much power
| over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation.
|
| After all they all will be able to afford ticket to Elysium.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| It's unfortunate you are being downvoted because you have a
| lot valid points.
|
| > If we are to survive climate change we would have to cull
| all politicians and dirty industry leaders. They have so much
| power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next
| generation.
|
| I agree this is the inevitable end of this trajectory.
| Eventually there will be environmental extreme groups that
| will target fossil fuel leaders.
|
| Controversially, ignoring the ethical aspects of this, it
| would be an incentives equalizer to precipitate real climate
| regulation. Currently there is no incentive to do so, this
| dynamics would change with a palpable fear of immediate
| injury/death.
| hedgedoops2 wrote:
| Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon credits
| through carbon capture / sequestration, and tighten the
| emissions cap. For 4% of global GDP you could
| stop/compensate global co2 emissions based on current
| carbon capture technology's prices per ton of co2 removed.
| [1] If there were a business case for CCS, the cost would
| come further down. Currently there is no profit in it.
|
| One would need to restrict the allowed methods to safe and
| scalable ones (like extraction from seawater, not ocean
| seeding).
|
| [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk for prices
| and methods + https://www.mcc-
| berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock... +
| simplistic back of envelope calculation (assumes cost
| scales up linearly)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon
| credits through carbon capture / sequestration,_
|
| Except companies will go for the cheapest possible
| solution that "counts" for carbon credits, which is
| probably entirely fraudulent.
| karlp wrote:
| So don't have those fraudulent solutions?
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| See off-shore accounting and special tax jurisdictions,
| for a solid track record on Humans not having fradulent
| solutions (specially when profit is at stake).
| einpoklum wrote:
| Carbon credits are a mechanism by which excessive
| pollution is supposedly legitimized by other actions.
| It's a rather nefarious scheme IMHO. We should treat the
| activities of governments, companies and other
| organizations in a disaggregated fashion: Pumping out
| CO_2 and other pollutants into the air should be
| penalized, and engaging in CO_2-and-methane-sequestering
| activity (e.g. forestation) should be encouraged,
| independently of one another.
| mnadkvlb wrote:
| Sorry, i dont think that is a good idea.
|
| Its like telling me that its ok if a company shits in my
| garden and then donates some money to the public cleaning
| fund.
|
| I dont want to have trash in my garden or deal with shit
| from companies.
|
| We are actively trashing this planet for younger
| generations. To feel good we say, no problem to companies
| if they donate some money to charities or organizations
| which do some cleanup.
|
| Why allow companies to pollute in first place ?
|
| Oh wait, because of lobbies.
|
| Never Mind.
| williamtwild wrote:
| Carbon credits are a joke. Its basically "so I'm clean
| over here which means I can be dirty over there! Profit!"
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| Carbon credits are like paying someone else to not commit
| adultery so that you can commit adultery guilt-free.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Politicians in general are no longer accountable to the
| public. I've long thought that some tarring and feathering
| is overdue.
| exporectomy wrote:
| That's only because the public keeps re-electing them and
| their parties regardless of what they do. It's the voters
| who are not holding politicians accountable.
| andrepd wrote:
| And that's only because for-profit media outlets owned by
| the bourgeoisie control the "narrative" and have huge
| power to influence people's electoral decisions.
|
| Regardless, writing X in a box every four years is hardly
| a "democracy".
| exporectomy wrote:
| You can find causes for causes all the way back in the
| chain. But voters are human beings with independent
| agency to act according to their own wishes. They have
| the ability to break the chain of causation if they want.
| And they don't. So it's their fault.
|
| It's the same way that you can't say a child abuser isn't
| responsible for his crimes because he was abused himself
| as a child. Yes, that's a factor that contributed to his
| actions, but he's still responsible for his own actions
| no matter how difficult the decision is.
|
| Yes, voting every 4 years is a democracy. It might not be
| direct democracy but direct democracy has serious
| problems and you probably wouldn't want it.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Current days political campaigning is pure emotional
| control. And its in a runaway effect state.
|
| Politicians, backed by professional PR companies who in
| turn are based on sociology/psychology and years of
| studies, can pull on emotional strings of people who are
| already self identify into entrenched positions. Using
| emotions is clearly easier and more powerful way of
| getting votes. The only way to win is to play their game,
| and that costs a lot of money.
|
| Its a fools game to try convince anyone with facts, it
| simply doesn't work. Thats why anti vaccines, flat earth
| etc are so rampant today. The more you reason with those
| type of people the more you entrench them.
| hughrr wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted because that's
| exactly what they're doing. I worked for a company that
| was being paid to work out how best to manipulate people
| into certain political outcomes by trying things and
| measuring results. Of course they didn't market
| themselves as that. I quit when I worked out what they
| were doing.
| chasd00 wrote:
| "trying things and measuring results"
|
| do you mean plain jane A/B testing?
| hughrr wrote:
| Nope much more insidious. A/B testing is statistically
| random. This thing dangled the desirable result down a
| path of rewards to attempt to reprogram people into
| accepting version A while discarding version B, then
| measuring which method to do so was more effective.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| Interested in hearing more about your story if you're
| willing to share.
| hughrr wrote:
| I'd probably get fucked over if I mention names which
| would be required. Not very nice people.
| hnbad wrote:
| "No longer"? When were they accountable to the public? To
| public opinion, sure, but we still have opinion polls and
| politicians in most Western countries spend a lot of
| money on trying to shape that. But accountability is
| incompatible with centralization and multiple layers of
| delegation.
|
| There's also the rather obvious conflict of interest
| between politicians needing/wanting money and politicians
| being supposed to represent the will of the people
| (rather than the will of those who can give them a lot of
| money). That police officers aren't being bribed doesn't
| mean we don't have corruption. We just have corruption
| with Western characteristics.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Controversially, ignoring ethical aspects, you could
| eliminate most violent crime by killing off the poorest
| people in each country. You could prevent child abuse by
| killing children. You could encourage any kind of behavior
| you want by randomly killing people who disobey your
| demands. Wouldn't life be great if you were an
| authoritarian dictator with no morals.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| (Reductio ad ridiculum, doesn't allows to have a very
| meaningful discussion)
| exporectomy wrote:
| Sure. But neither does inciting murder. Some problems
| can't be solved just by being angry enough to kill people
| you hate. The oil industry will continue no matter who
| you kill or how dangerous it becomes because everyone and
| their dog will be throwing money at whoever can supply
| oil.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Apart from the fact that this is logical fallacy, all
| your examples are not civilisation ending scenarios.
|
| If we both are on a cliff face and you fell off, and now
| you are dangling connected by rope to only me. Standard
| movie trope.
|
| Now because of your weight my only options are to cut the
| rope - you die, or wait and we both die. This is more
| accurate example we are talking about here, not killing
| poor people because 'crime'.
|
| Also I would like to point out that poor people are not
| root cause of crime. So you are not tackling actual
| problem, only applying band-aid solutions. But that's a
| tangential topic.
| exporectomy wrote:
| > all your examples are not civilisation ending
| scenarios.
|
| Neither is climate change, is it? Unless there's some
| research I haven't heard about, I think you're doing
| science denial misinformation spouting.
| spinny wrote:
| > It's unfortunate you are being downvoted because you have
| a lot valid points.
|
| that tends to happen around here. valid points don't
| matter, only group think get upvoted
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| Totally agree. Just that I probably mean another group.
|
| Its incredible how common it is that people picture
| themselves as self-thinking individuals who came to their
| conclusions by doing their own research ... and then
| repeat all the standard talking points by some other
| group.
| Guthur wrote:
| What valid points, mass murder or some space station from
| a movie?
|
| It was the same old nonsense with no actual solutions.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| - Germany closing down Nuclear meant a greater dependency
| on Carbon emitting energy sources with no down time (Coal
| and even more so Gas)
|
| - Nord Stream 2 is a project that will further allow
| Germany to burn more Gas cheaper (more emissions) and
| become geopoliticaly more dependent on Russian
| infrastructure
|
| - The EU loses geopolitical strength if it is unable to
| cut ties with Russia as an escalation counter-measure
| (Because it's biggest net contributor actually needs
| Russian gas to keep the lights on).
|
| - Just like you have had extreme groups and extremist
| recruitment/propaganda forming around other divisive
| issues, it is inevitable that some form of environment
| related extremism will evolve in particular when
| populations start to become displaced. The obvious target
| of such groups would be fossil fuel industry leaders and
| lobbyists.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| The German public (and especially the Green party) has been
| against nuclear power not since the Chernobyl TV series
| (which I think didn't tell anything new to most Germans), but
| since the _original_ Chernobyl incident in 1986. Chernobyl
| was most likely the catalyst of why the Greens became so
| popular in Germany in the first place. And now that they are
| becoming the most powerful political force, don 't expect the
| German stance towards nuclear power to change in the next few
| decades.
|
| (to be clear, I fully support the decommission of European
| nuclear plants, Europe is just too small and too densely
| populated to risk nuclear accidents, or for long term storage
| of nuclear waste)
| jopsen wrote:
| > Europe is just too small and too densely populated to
| risk nuklear accidents.
|
| Maybe, if we built new safe reactors it wouldn't be a
| problem.
|
| That said, it's probably faster to go renewable -- so is it
| too much to ask that Germany doesn't build more cold fired
| plants?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, no new coal plants will be built:
|
| https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-
| plant-...
|
| Coal seems to be roughly on the same trajectory as
| nuclear, and since around 2015 on a much sharper decline:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Datteln 4 just started operating last year
| flohofwoe wrote:
| And that was the last one, meanwhile 8 other coal power
| plants had been closed in the same year. Planning and
| building power plants takes a long time, especially in
| Germany, where all big construction projects take
| forever. It's clear that there's gonna be some overlap
| between old and new plans.
| fsflover wrote:
| > Europe is just too small and too densely populated to
| risk nuclear accidents, or for long term storage of nuklear
| waste
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874421
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Well yeah, but the situation is simply that nobody wants
| to have nuclear waste in their own backyard. They don't
| even want it to move through their backyard (see the
| Castor protests).
| fsflover wrote:
| Having coal waste in the backyard is fine though, despite
| it's _more_ radioactive.
| me_me_me wrote:
| I'll take it any day over coal plant. Those produce more
| pollution and radiation than nuclear plants.
| fredm-de wrote:
| The trigger for the decision was not the recent Chernobyl
| series but the Fukushima incident combined with an important
| election. If Fukushima would have happened a month later,
| Germany probably wouldn't have decided to shut down it's
| unclear power plants.
|
| On October 28th 2010 the German government (CDU & FPD) voted
| to prolong the usage of its existing power plants for another
| 8 years. Fukushima happened on March 11th 2011. Put under
| pressure by an increasing poll numbers of the (anti-nuclear)
| Green Party and having a state election upcoming on March
| 27th the same government decided to close down the power
| plants.
| the-dude wrote:
| > shut down it's unclear power plants.
|
| Now _that_ is a typo if I ever saw one.
| fredm-de wrote:
| Should of course be nuclear.
| hnbad wrote:
| Well, the German Greens (along with NGOs like Greenpeace)
| have always campaigned against nuclear in a way that very
| effectively shaped public opinion to allow Merkel to use
| the Fukushima scare as an opportunity to shut down nuclear
| power.
|
| Note that Germany's newest nuclear power plants were built
| in 1982, before the Chernobyl incident and before the
| merger of the West German Greens with the East German
| progressive movement (which made the party more politically
| relevant). This resulted in lifetimes of existing nuclear
| plants continuously being extended, which in terms of
| safety was much worse than building new ones.
|
| There are six plants currently still operating, half of
| which are scheduled to be shut down by the end of this
| year, the other half scheduled to be shut down by the end
| of next year.
|
| Ironically, the nuclear scares have not resulted in a
| massive expansion of renewables but in a strengthening of
| fossil fuels and especially coal (which is heavily
| subsidized and has even led to land being expropriated "in
| the common interest" to allow energy companies to harvest
| lignite).
|
| As of 2018 Germany has vague goals about abolishing coal
| power by 2038 due to public pressure but in the most
| optimistic scenarios this doesn't involve shutting down any
| coal plants before 2035. That this is being discussed by
| (conservative and centrist) government officials at all is
| only the result of the Fridays For Future protests and
| related spillover movements (XR and more specifically "Ende
| Gelande", a series of protests directly targeting the
| surface mining sites).
| adrianN wrote:
| Nuclear is a tiny sliver in that chart. If decarbonization
| takes 1.3% longer because we also get rid of nuclear I think
| few people will complain. It would of course be nice for the
| climate to first shut off coal plants and then nuclear
| plants, but it's hard to get a majority for that in Germany's
| current political climate.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Its not so different from the covid vaccines. We don't need
| a solution. We need every solution available.
| legulere wrote:
| You can achieve much more per Euro though with renewables
| than nuclear.
| hik wrote:
| That is technically correct today. But that is because
| there are many problems with renewables that only really
| start to appear at scale.
|
| In the United States - many utilities gave up literal
| free money from the Federal Government on renewable
| deployment because it was creating problems with the grid
| at like, 2% of use.
|
| Nuclear is a drop in replacement for coal or natural gas.
| adrianN wrote:
| I completely agree and would be in favor of keeping
| nuclear power running. But I think that shutting off
| nuclear early is a very minor mistake compared to the
| general energy policy.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders
|
| Hello. Would it be possible to have a conversation about
| climate change that does not involve the suggestion that
| humans be killed en masse, in the manner of diseased animals?
| Thank you.
| s21n wrote:
| Why not?
|
| "If you truly claim to represent the people of the future,
| Frank asks -- people who have the exact same right to a
| livable planet that we do -- doesn't that mean you should
| be willing to kill in their defense? Not as a first choice,
| not as the only choice -- but can you really take it off
| the table? 'If your organization represents the people who
| will be born after us, well, that's a heavy burden! It's a
| real responsibility! You have to think like them! You have
| to do what they would do if they were here,' Frank argues.
| 'I don't think they would countenance murder,' retorts
| Mary, to which Frank replies, 'Of course they would!'
|
| The Ministry for the Future is thus a novel about
| bureaucracy, but it's also about the possibility of a wide
| diversity of tactics in the name of a livable future that
| include fighting both inside and outside the system.
| Characters in the novel contemplate targeted assassination
| of politicians and CEOs, industrial sabotage of coal
| plants, intentionally bringing down airliners in the name
| of destroying commercial air travel, bioterrorism against
| industrial slaughterhouses -- and they do more than
| contemplate them. How does it change what's possible when
| we stop worrying so much about losing in the right way, and
| start thinking about winning in the wrong ways?" [1]
|
| To be honest, I'm surprised we're not seeing more acts of
| eco-terrorism yet. There are only isolated incidents of
| infrastructure sabotage. [2] I think it will change if
| (when) we don't meet the 2030 emission targets.
|
| 1. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/of-course-they-
| would-on-...
|
| 2. https://theintercept.com/2019/10/04/dakota-access-
| pipeline-s...
| kodah wrote:
| I don't believe that people that use violent rhetoric in
| political speech (fight, war, kill, hang, etc) really
| know what any of those things are like. If you knew what
| it was to take a human life, no matter how self-
| justified, would you bloviate about it so openly?
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| I suspect that most of us here are unwilling to
| countenance murder; that's why not.
| [deleted]
| splithalf wrote:
| "surprised we're not seeing more acts of eco-terrorism
| yet"
|
| People don't work the way you think they do, yet.
| Woodi wrote:
| >> cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders
|
| > Why not ?
|
| You are joking, right ? Or not thinking about what you
| are saying. Or not respecting that ugly thing -
| "history"...
|
| You see, when killing starts it's do not stop. 1) goals
| are not fully achived; b) killers starts to "clean" their
| ex-own camrades... Soviet Rossia, French revolution are
| obvious examples; c) killers starts to live in fear of
| being killed and create despotic countries - that was
| what you wanted ? I thinked goal was just "protect
| environment"...
|
| Now compare what achived Soviets and what that dirty
| Capitalists - who actually get civilized first ? You know
| that in 70's in UK main society parasites was unions ? -
| working class won too much. In the mean time: in CCCP and
| China and Nord Korea you had terror not "freedom for
| all!"
|
| That's why you do not do things by killing - it dop not
| work.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > They have so much power over the world and don;t give a
| fuck about next generation.
|
| Just like all the consumers buying all that stuff and just
| like all voters not voting for politicians that would change
| something?
|
| Yeah but sure, it's always "the elites" fault.
| akudha wrote:
| Do you realize the amount of money poured into
| propaganda/brain washing of the electorate? Even if all
| voters suddenly become super informed overnight, it is
| still hard to vote for good politicians (the very few)
| because of issues like gerrymandering etc?
|
| Yes, voters should take responsibility. But too much
| destruction comes from the _elites_. But feel free to
| support them. When this planet is ravaged by the effects of
| climate change, no elite will help you. They have their
| bunkers built and ready to move in.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| Gerrymandering is only a problem (with respect to climate
| change) if around half of the voters don't care about
| climate change.
|
| As you said, there _are_ good politicians. Its us that do
| not vote for them.
|
| In Germany, it was always the same: in between elections,
| the Green party have really nice results in polls.
| However, when it comes to the election, people prefer
| reducing (or not increasing) taxes and stuff over fixing
| the climate.
|
| People DO know about climate change. There IS good
| information available online. Its not that people have no
| idea what's happening. They just don't care to do
| something themselves - there's enough other people to fix
| it. Its like an email with lots of recipients, no one
| feels responsible to reply.
|
| > But feel free to support them.
|
| I never said I support them. I said we could easily get
| rid of them, of we only wanted to. The problem is (half
| of) the people around you, not the elites put in power by
| them.
| waihtis wrote:
| Is the green party in Germany really a primarily green
| party or is it like the Finnish green party, which is
| simultaneously green and hardcore leftist?
|
| Asking because that is why voting for the green party may
| be a huge turnoff for many (like myself.)
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| Luckily, nowadays they pretty much got rid of their
| fundamentalist/leftwing arm. They kinda turned
| "conservative", but in a positive sense.
|
| In my opinion, them being a possible choice for
| conservative voters keeps our conservative party from
| doing too much rightwing crap, as they will know they'll
| loose voters to the Greens. We'll see how stuff goes in
| September (national elections). Under the hood, there's
| still lots of rightwing tendencies in our conservative
| party, unfortunately.
| waihtis wrote:
| What do you constitute as rightwing crap, out of
| interest?
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| For example, appealing to voters of this party:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany
|
| Its an officially extremist party (observed by the
| "Verfassungsschutz" [or: "Federal Office for the
| Protection of the Constitution"], that traditionally kind
| of ignored the far-right), one of their leaders can
| officially be called a fascist (court ruling), and
| another leader says the 3rd Reich was kind of not that
| big of a deal.
| waihtis wrote:
| Figured since we can observe the same phenomena
| everywhere in EU.
|
| Regardless, by this point I think it is inevitable some
| of the hardcore right wing politics will enter
| mainstream; we (as in Europe as a whole) took too many
| immigrants without any consideration of how to manage
| them.
|
| Lest anyone try to throw the nazi card my way it should
| be stated that this is a failure born from rigid top-down
| management structure of the EU which does not even
| remotely have the flexibility required to manage external
| shock events like this. Same reason why the joint debt
| mechanism being forced on the excuse of COVID is a
| horrible idea and will end in tears for many.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > we (as in Europe as a whole) took too many immigrants
| without any consideration of how to manage them
|
| So in Germany, we are actually quite successful in
| managing the million that came in 2015. Most got a job
| and pay taxes. Actually quite awesome, fiveteen years ago
| everyone in Germany was afraid we'll run out of young
| workers.
|
| > it should be stated that this is a failure born from
| rigid top-down management structure of the EU
|
| As far as I remember, the problem was that it was
| actually not possible to do a top-down decision, because
| each national government did whatever they wanted to do?
| I guess the only thing we did end up doing on a EU-wide
| level was border protection. Not sure though.
|
| > Same reason why the joint debt mechanism being forced
| on the excuse of COVID is a horrible idea and will end in
| tears for many.
|
| Funny, I strongly believe its the reason the EU will not
| just survive but strive. Finally, the excuse of "all the
| money we have to give to the EU" is gone. Soon, the EU
| will have some taxes that only make sense on the EU level
| (financial transactions, or a tax on digital goods) and
| we're good. Besides, no national government would get the
| low interest rates when taking up debt that the EU
| combined will get, right?
| waihtis wrote:
| > Funny, I strongly believe its the reason the EU will
| not just survive but strive. Finally, the excuse of "all
| the money we have to give to the EU" is gone. Soon, the
| EU will have some taxes that only make sense on the EU
| level (financial transactions, or a tax on digital goods)
| and we're good. Besides, no national government would get
| the low interest rates when taking up debt that the EU
| combined will get, right?
|
| We paid in 6 billion into the relief fund and are
| projected to get less than 3 out of it wrapped in some
| pre-determined financial instruments. It's like paying
| 10EUR for a gift card that's worth 4EUR and only works
| for some specific shops. People would call that a rubbish
| deal but what do I know.
|
| In addition, our politicians lied very intentionally to
| us that this is a one-time fund, just for COVID purposes.
| Less than 2 weeks later after passing the vote in
| parliament, Governor of the Bank of Italy Ignazia Visco
| is already marketing the fund as permanent and the future
| of a joint monetary EU strategy.
|
| Excuse me if I don't share your optimism on this swindle,
| but then again unlike us, Germany is a very likely
| benefactor from all of this. Because let's call it what
| it is - it's a redistribution of wealth into the power
| centers of EU obscured by lies and insane amounts of
| bureaucracy.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| Well, the EU is pretty heterogeneous, so I would expect
| different politicians saying and wanting different
| things. Still seems like its worth it, though, on an
| economical level at least.
|
| England, for example, did only join the EU back then for
| economical reasons. Them leaving the EU now doesn't seem
| like an economical win (and it was probably not an
| decision made based on economics, I guess).
|
| So I agree that
|
| > Germany is a very likely benefactor from all of this.
|
| but I would argue that all countries in the EU are.
|
| > Because let's call it what it is - it's a
| redistribution of wealth into the power centers of EU
| obscured by lies (...)
|
| Which lies do you mean, for example?
|
| > (...) and insane amounts of bureaucracy.
|
| Well yeah. But if the EU would not manage these things,
| each country would have to manage them with each of the
| other countries, leading to much much more bureaucracy.
| Retric wrote:
| Gerrymandering can give a great deal of power to ~26% of
| the population. It takes just over 1/2 the seats in a
| congress to control legislation, and ~1/2 the voters in
| those locations. 1/2 * ~1/2 ~= 1/4
|
| The US senate is even more extreme. Wyoming at 578,759
| people has exactly as much power as California with
| 39,512,223. Clearly a party aiming to minimize the number
| of voters it needs to please would avoid California.
| After all if you get the right 10% of voters you win and
| who cares about anything else.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > t takes just over 1/2 the seats in a congress to
| control legislation, and ~1/2 the voters in those
| locations. 1/2 * ~1/2 ~= 1/4
|
| I don't follow. I assume turnout would have to be taken
| into account? Also, I was specifically saying "voters",
| not "population" (more by luck, though) ;-)
|
| > The US senate is even more extreme.
|
| Yeah that's very true. Weren't some of the sates
| basically only created to give a certain party the
| majority? Forgot where I read or heard that though.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| Suppose there are 100 seats in parliament. To gain
| political power, you need to win 51 seats. So in theory
| you could get (50+epsilon)% of the votes in each of 51
| seats, and 0 votes in any of the other 49 seats and hold
| power, despite only getting ~25% of the overall vote
| (assuming the population is evenly distributed among the
| seats).
|
| Actually you don't even need to get that many votes.
| Depending on the electoral system you might not need to
| win a majority of the votes in _any_ constituency, you
| just need more votes than anyone else, which could be a
| very low percentage if the opposition is split enough
| ways.
|
| The current governing party in the UK holds a comfortable
| majority of seats despite only winning 43% of the vote in
| the last election. And in fact, this was the highest vote
| share received by any party in decades. Labour in 1997
| won more seats on a lower vote share.
|
| > Weren't some of the sates basically only created to
| give a certain party the majority?
|
| I've read that the reason Dakota Territory was split in
| two (North and South) upon statehood was mainly as a
| cynical ploy to get two extra senate seats for the
| favoured party.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > So in theory you could get (50+epsilon)% of the votes
| in each of 51 seats, and 0 votes in any of the other 49
| seats and hold power, despite only getting ~25% of the
| overall vote
|
| Ah ok, got it. However, probably an unlikely scenario
| even in a "segregated" (republicans vs democrats) country
| as the US. But yeah - the reality right now that 40, 45%
| of the votes are enough for - in the case of the US - the
| republicans to win is pretty bad already.
|
| > Depending on the electoral system you might not need to
| win a majority of the votes in any constituency,
|
| In Germany we have two ways to get into the Bundestag
| (national parliament) - the one is a "Direktmandat" (the
| candidate with the most votes in one county county gets
| the seat), the other is via the party ticket. The parties
| have lists of candidates, and depending on their
| percentage of the total vote, the first X candidates get
| a seat.
|
| That system tries to balance between each county getting
| the representative in they favor, but also representing
| the relative votes via the party ticket.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| This is a very good summation of the problem. People do not
| want to change their consumer habits and their voting
| choices reflect that.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Rich people naturally hold more power, proportionally to
| their wealth. They're also likely to have played a part in
| technology which create pollution.
|
| Because we have a government which uses threat of violence
| to exert extra power even if they don't have money, it's
| natural to blame them as well.
|
| If we were living in complete anarchy, we would definitely
| hold the polluter accountable for polluting the world and
| demand some retribution, possibly using a private court
| system and some underlying threat of violence (which can be
| externalised through agencies specialised in that).
|
| Right now we can blame government officials and the rich
| people who benefited from pollution and paid them.
| zepto wrote:
| > Rich people naturally hold more power, proportionally
| to their wealth.
|
| This ends up being a cop out. Everyone consumes, and rich
| people consume _less_ than poor people relative to their
| wealth.
|
| Generally rich people get rich by selling stuff people
| want.
|
| > Right now we can blame government officials and the
| rich people who benefited from pollution and paid them.
|
| And we can also blame poor people for putting those rich
| people in power and consuming their wares.
| makomk wrote:
| > Everyone consumes, and rich people consume less than
| poor people relative to their wealth.
|
| Which, of course, means that all this talk about blaming
| the rich are a distraction from one unavoidable thing:
| since most of the consumption comes from ordinary people
| and not the rich, any substantial decrease in consumption
| has to come from them too. It's the ordinary masses that
| will lose the ability to travel abroad (and probably be
| limited in their ability to travel within their own
| country), who won't be able to see their friends and
| family so much anymore, who will lose a lot of the daily
| comforts of life. Blaming the rich can't change that.
| Guardian headlines about how "just 100 companies" are
| responsible for most emissions based on counting all
| emissions from the fossil fuels produced by them as their
| emissions, regardless of whether they're being burnt in
| everyone's cars and to heat everyone's homes, won't
| change that either. All it does is hopefully distract
| blame from the activists trying to take things away from
| everyone.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > It's the ordinary masses that will lose the ability to
| travel abroad (and probably be limited in their ability
| to travel within their own country), who won't be able to
| see their friends and family so much anymore, who will
| lose a lot of the daily comforts of life.
|
| Pretty dark view of the future. Its not that we have to
| lose all those things, we just got to change a little bit
| in how we produce things and electricity and how we
| travel. And got to insulate houses a little. We don't
| have to give up any of the comforts of modern life.
|
| That's actually the worst part of it all: its not even
| that we would have to give up something in order to
| prevent climate change. We'd just have to CHANGE
| something, but even that seems to be too much to ask.
| That really makes me mad. So incredibly unnecessary :(
| fogihujy wrote:
| Problem is that those changes will be prohibitly
| expensive for a lot of people. There's a lot of people
| who rarely get out, and who's struggling just to be able
| to buy a cheap smart phone every year and a last-minute
| all-inclusive trip to Las Palmas twice per decade.
|
| If rents go up due to climate-saving efforts, they will
| have to give those up. Because landlords won't give up
| their profits.
|
| Change incurs costs. Costs means someone is paying.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > Problem is that those changes will be prohibitly
| expensive for a lot of people.
|
| There's this idea that we introduce a carbon tax, and pay
| out the money to people. Seems like this could be
| designed in a way those people don't suffer.
|
| > If rents go up due to climate-saving efforts, they will
| have to give those up. Because landlords won't give up
| their profits.
|
| That's why we can implement laws forcing them to. If they
| add insulation to the house, the cost for heating will go
| down. So we just got to make sure that the one makes up
| for the other.
|
| > Change incurs costs. Costs means someone is paying.
|
| But its an investment, isn't it? Its not like we're
| throwing the money out of the window. We're investing, we
| are building things that will have a positive net return
| in the long run. For example, solar and wind are so cheap
| now and don't require constant imports (or digging up of)
| fuel. So in the long run, we'll have a more robust and
| cheaper energy production. Or from above - insulating a
| house will cost money now, but we'll save money in the
| long run.
| js8 wrote:
| > Everyone consumes, and rich people consume less than
| poor people relative to their wealth.
|
| But that's irrelevant metric. The nature only cares about
| absolute amount of consumption, and in absolute numbers,
| rich consume significantly more than poor.
|
| The fact that rich could have consumed a lot more
| according to our own measure of "wealth" doesn't make
| them less morally culpable, since this is not tracked by
| nature at all.
|
| I realized I should also add, it's not just direct
| consumption, investment can cause emissions too.
| Investment often means building infrastructure, which
| nature counts as consumption regardless whether the
| investment is then recouped or not (if it's not, then
| it's a waste). Investment also drives consumption in
| other ways, often directly through advertising or people
| just realizing they "need" a new service or product that
| they didn't need before.
|
| Even savings (richer people just keeping money in assets)
| are not immune from not having a side-effect on
| consumption. As assets prices rise, this sends the market
| wrong signals and the result can be for example building
| far more housing that is needed, again resulting in
| additional consumption of resources.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Look at those stupid surfs not wanting to have land and
| freedom. Sucking up to their lords.
|
| > Yeah but sure, it's always "the feudalism" fault.
|
| M'kay.
| refurb wrote:
| Are you arguing as a consumer you have no control over
| the products you buy or the energy sources you use?
| Because that's not true.
| Forbo wrote:
| Consumers don't have as much choice as you make it out to
| be. I can't choose the sourcing of my power utility's
| generation. Nor can I choose to get an EV because my home
| doesn't have the ability to support charging. So I'm
| stuck with buying renewable energy credits from a third
| party in order to attempt to offset the dirty power
| generation sources and driving an inferior hybrid car.
| scatters wrote:
| Did you consider the ability to charge an EV when buying
| (renting?) your home? Will you factor that in when moving
| in future?
|
| Consumers have more choice than you think; not everyone,
| but a definite proportion come into a position to make a
| choice on a continual basis. And economically, it is the
| margin that matters.
| m4x wrote:
| What if he _had_ considered EV charging? Or chose to move
| again this month? Somebody would still be living in his
| current house and driving a non-EV because that 's what's
| available.
|
| These "choices" are largely meaningless. The choices that
| matter are ones which reduce emissions or waste _across
| society_ , not for one individual.
|
| Upgrading to an EV does little to prevent climate change.
| Do all new EV owners have their old ICE vehicles
| responsibly destroyed? No, they mostly just sell them on.
| All you do by choosing to buy an EV and a house with
| charging is push the emissions onto somebody else.
|
| The important choices, the ones that determine the
| overwhelming bulk of the outcomes, are being decided by
| elites and politicians. And they are choosing in the
| wrong direction.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| But we don't even make use of the little choice _that_ we
| have. And for example in Germany, you can choose
| electricity providers that only use renewables.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Because people have neither time nor money for any of
| this. Most of the population worries about short-term
| things like "having food on the table", "keeping that
| job", "keeping myself healthy", "giving my children a
| better future, so that their lives aren't as hard as
| mine".
|
| We've just signed a new contract with our electricity
| provider in Poland. Renewable usage didn't even enter the
| discussion - none of us even realized there's a _choice_
| there. Only when reading the details of the agreement I
| realized the provider is committing themselves to deliver
| electricity from renewable sources. So now, I 'm powering
| my computer with green energy, and so is likely my entire
| neighbourhood. Not because any of us made that choice -
| it's because the _power company did_.
|
| Systemic incentives are what's needed to save us. Getting
| a power company to go green is much more cost-effective
| than trying to make an equivalent number of consumers to
| switch individually.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > "giving my children a better future, so that their
| lives aren't as hard as mine"
|
| Although they'll have a pretty hard live if we don't do
| something against climate change. And yes, many people do
| not have the resources to do these tings.
|
| > Because people have neither time nor money for any of
| this.
|
| Many people do not have that, yes. But many others do,
| and they could start doing it and as they are probably
| the ones better off, their over-proportional influence as
| consumers would make a huge difference. Its a complete
| failure of the "middle class".
|
| > Systemic incentives are what's needed to save us.
|
| Well yeah, I agree that politics/elections are a better
| way. Its just that ... we do neither. We do not take our
| individual responsibilities serious, neither when voting,
| nor when consuming.
| bluGill wrote:
| >n Germany, you can choose electricity providers that
| only use renewables.
|
| That is a false choice - unless electricity providers
| have wires all the way to your house you have no idea
| where the electricity came from. All you know is they buy
| enough renewable to cover what you use. However if you
| didn't use them the renewable power would mostly be
| generated at the same time anyway, just at a lower cost.
|
| The above isn't completely true, as the higher price you
| pay does get a bit more renewable power into the mix.
| However overall it isn't a big factor unless most people
| choose the same provider.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| They're not more expensive. And of course it changes
| something when enough people change providers, as those
| providers then have more money to invest in renewables,
| just as you said. If enough people switch, coal power
| plants would have to shut down as no one would buy their
| elecricity.
| ratsforhorses wrote:
| As "a" consumer I do, but I think they're arguing that we
| need our "leaders" to show some "spine"... they have the
| power to force corporations to make drastic changes, but
| till now they're either dumb, deaf, blind or zombiefied
| by power (or promises of)... The average consumer doesn't
| think there is a point in changing behaviour(or
| economically can't) and being an example for others (or
| different) requires...spine?
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > but I think they're arguing that we need our "leaders"
| to show some "spine"
|
| I was arguing that we can vote in politicians with a
| spine with respect to doing something about climate
| change, if the ones we have don't do their job.
|
| I think it is really important to acknowledge how well
| the political system works, at least in Europe.
| Politicians largely do what their voters want from them.
|
| Its the voters that don't want climate change
| legislation. Take Germany: the conservative party did
| rule now for 16 years, and they are certainly fulfilling
| their voters wishes by _NOT_ doing something about
| climate change. Voters of that party don 't want that.
|
| > The average consumer doesn't think there is a point in
| changing behaviour
|
| Unfortunately I have the feeling that the consumer just
| does not want to change behavior, no matter if it would
| change something or not. Afterwards, they'll rationalize
| their decision with such arguments, sure.
| adrianN wrote:
| The big four are buildings, electricity, transportation
| and agriculture. The typical consumer has no influence on
| buildings, because they rent. They have a little
| influence on electricity, because they can choose to buy
| greenwashed electrons, but they have no influence on
| energy policy. They have yet a little more influence on
| transportation, because most can choose not to fly, some
| can choose not to use a car (or at least use an EV if
| they can afford it). But they have almost no influence
| on, e.g. public transportation infrastructure, charging
| infrastructure, cycling infrastructure, or city planning.
| Only in agriculture you can actually make a difference in
| your emissions by eating less meat, but there too there
| is no path for the consumer to carbon neutrality.
|
| Overall, a conscious consumer can maybe cut their carbon
| output in half compared to their peers, but their actions
| have no path towards actual carbon neutrality. That is a
| problem that needs to be tackled by politicians.
| ravenstine wrote:
| If it's not incumbent on our leaders to have that
| responsibility, then what good are they?
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| _WE_ voted for them. And voted for them again.
|
| If they don't show responsibility, and we vote them in
| again and again, it is not their fault, its ours.
|
| Stuff like: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice,
| shame on me?
| ravenstine wrote:
| We did vote for them, and I absolutely agree.
|
| The one problem with that is the equation is not that
| simple.
|
| Most of our so-called leaders come from a completely
| different class than the rest of us, or were inducted
| into that class through their networks. They spend
| billions to make sure that everything goes their way.
| Unfortunately, you don't just have people voting for
| leaders; you have leaders pushing propaganda to influence
| thought patterns to make people vote for whomever has the
| most resources, and alternative voices are pushed off the
| stage before most people have a chance to change their
| minds.
|
| Voters are to blame, but those with the most power aren't
| absolved just because the voters give them their value.
| That value is also mined from the public through careful
| manipulation.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > Most of our so-called leaders come from a completely
| different class than the rest of us, or were inducted
| into that class through their networks.
|
| Yes. And some are not, and we could vote for them to give
| them more influence. I bet once that happens, even more
| of such people would come into politics.
|
| > Unfortunately, you don't just have people voting for
| leaders; you have leaders pushing propaganda to influence
| thought patterns to make people vote for whomever has the
| most resources, and alternative voices are pushed off the
| stage before most people have a chance to change their
| minds.
|
| Speaking for Germany (and I believe it is the same in
| many European countries), I don't see that. I don't see
| manipulation and propaganda on that level, and I do, for
| example, see quite a lot of good journalism providing
| good information.
|
| Of course there's wild theories going around on social
| media and influencing people in really bad ways, but
| that's just people telling lies to other people, not a
| lot of the classic elite/leaders there.
|
| > those with the most power aren't absolved just because
| the voters give them their value
|
| I absolutely agree. That's why its so depressing that we
| do not vote such people out.
| [deleted]
| andrepd wrote:
| You can spend your entire life fretting over how each and
| every one of the products you use was produced. You can
| dig through hard to find information (if there is even
| such public information at all!) and devote literal
| _hours_ per day on that quest. You will have made an
| impact which is a millionth of what an (unelectable,
| unaccountable) CEO can do with a decision of his.
|
| This is not sustainable, it's not democratic, frankly it
| has to change.
|
| PS: Not to mention you can only even have the luxury of
| doing this if you're at least relatively well off. If
| you're poor you just buy cheapest of everything, no
| questions asked.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| But there's stuff that doesn't fall in that category.
| Flying for example. In Europe, where trains are a viable
| alternative to shorter-distance flights, still lots of
| people would not even think about taking the train
| because ... don't know, flying is cool?
|
| > it's not democratic
|
| How is it not democratic if democracy decided to not
| force those CEOs do make different decisions? We can
| force them. Easily. Even better, we don't even have to
| force them, we just have to increase taxes on stuff we
| don't want and subsidize stuff we want. That, for
| example, worked extremely well to get renewables in
| electricity production to 50% in Germany (within 15
| years, while the new government was trying to work
| against it).
|
| We're just not doing it. We're not voting for politicians
| that would write regulation and laws that would force
| those CEOs to decide differently. There's no reason,
| nothing to keep us from doing it, no brainwashing,
| nothing. Just way too few people that think of climate
| change in the voting booth. It really sucks, but it
| doesn't help to blame anyone else than most of the people
| around you.
|
| > Not to mention you can only even have the luxury of
| doing this if you're at least relatively well off. If
| you're poor you just buy cheapest of everything, no
| questions asked.
|
| If you're poor, your CO2 emissions probably are way lower
| than if you're rich.
| andrepd wrote:
| > Flying for example. In Europe, where trains are a
| viable alternative to shorter-distance flights, still
| lots of people would not even think about taking the
| train because...
|
| Because the pollution of flying isn't adequately
| accounted for and priced as an externality. If we had a
| proper carbon tax (which I dislike the name, it's
| actually simply a carbon _price_ ) then green
| transportation would be cheaper than flying (and then all
| second-order effects would kick in: more incentive to
| invest in green transportation, more incentive to leave
| flying, etc).
|
| > How is it not democratic if democracy decided to not
| force those CEOs
|
| > We're just not doing it. We're not voting for
| politicians that would write regulation
|
| Your entire argument relies on the _false_ premise that
| the will of the people is translated into policy. It 's
| not. Consider the following damning evidence:
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-
| poli...
|
| in particular Figure 1.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| > If we had a proper carbon tax
|
| That would be awesome :)
|
| > Your entire argument relies on the false premise that
| the will of the people is translated into policy.
|
| I can only speak for Germany, where it does. Right now,
| the Green party has the least seats of all parties in the
| national parliament. Why should the parliament then do
| something about climate change? However, when they were
| in the government between '98 and '05, the put the
| "EEG"[1] into effect (basically just implementing
| subsidies for renewables), and now 50% of our electricity
| is produced by renewables (not including nuclear). And
| that happened even though the following government tried
| to slow the transition.
|
| There's national elections in September in Germany. With
| some luck, the green party will be in the new government,
| right now they are 2nd in the polls. That will,
| undoubtedly, change national politics with respect to
| climate change policy.
|
| As for the US ... not sure what your problem currently
| is. Does the two party/winner takes it all system lead to
| these problems? Or is it because the republicans
| basically stopped caring about the truth in the 90s to
| win elections, spoiling the whole political process? No
| idea ... however, still, under the last three democratic
| presidents, more was done for the middle class (and
| probably less wars were started) then under republican
| presidents, right? So it does definitely matter what
| party wins, right, making voting not completely
| irrelevant even in the US?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy
| _Source...
| orthecreedence wrote:
| This argument assumes even distribution of wealth, which is
| a remarkably bad assumption. Most consumers are put in the
| position of having to choose between different variations
| of economic _survival_ and weighing in options like carbon-
| neutrality is often completely out of the question in favor
| of other products that are cheaper (granted, they 're only
| cheaper because "the elites" have found a way to
| externalize the costs of their production onto the rest of
| society).
|
| So yes, when the distribution of wealth is enormously
| skewed towards the elites, and production follows capital,
| it is absolutely the fault of "the elites."
|
| Don't give me astronomically less voting power than others
| and then blame me for not saving the world with my vote.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Germany is also the worlds largest lignite miner and won't
| shut down it's coal plants before 2038.
| api wrote:
| The politicians do what corporations and voters want or they
| get replaced by politicians who will.
|
| Corporations want profit. People want jobs and products.
| merpnderp wrote:
| The only way to "cull all politicians and dirty industry
| leaders" is realize that wind and solar can't provide base
| power at rates people can afford. And if people have to spend
| too much on electricity, they'll vote in new "politicians and
| dirty industry leaders", like Germany's (and soon France's)
| return to coal burning.
|
| If we started today with nuclear, we could trivially hit the
| 1.5C IPCC goal. Hell, we could likely hit it if the world
| started fracking and moved to wind/natgas plants (like the US
| is doing rapidly). But at least for now, nuclear and fracking
| are less preferable than >2C warming to nearly all climate
| change advocates.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I wish someone would do to the energy industry what SpaceX
| did to the space industry. Prove to the world what is now
| possible instead of excuse after excuse of defending the
| status quo.
| rndmize wrote:
| Arguably Tesla is doing exactly that. Solar is cheap and
| available these days, wind is growing consistently. The
| main issue is smoothing out the spikiness of these
| sources as they scale to significant parts of the grid.
| Tesla is the only company I hear about in a real "boots
| on the ground" kind of way, with notable projects
| deployed in recent years and a consistent effort to scale
| those projects up - everything else I've seen is in
| development, barely started, or vaporware.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > If we started today with nuclear, we could trivially hit
| the 1.5C IPCC goal.
|
| Just wanted to point out that this is nonsense. We already
| have 2C of warming baked in, if we go to net zero _today_ ,
| which is a complete fantasy.
|
| In fact we're likely to reach 1.5C of warming before those
| nuclear plants (that you propose we get started on) even
| come online.
|
| Did you even look at the graph in the top post in the
| thread?
| La1n wrote:
| > under excuses of damage and recent Chernobyl series.
|
| Actually it has been a way longer process starting in
| 2000/2001[1], with Fukushima having a significant impact.[2]
| It doesn't seem the Chernobyl series was responsible.
|
| [1]
| https://www.terradaily.com/2003/031114130333.jlvf6wjx.html
|
| [2] http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/4/14.abstract
| kuxv wrote:
| I always wondered why was Germany concerned about the
| events in Fukushima as that was caused by the
| earthquake/tsunami. Is that a common phenomenon in Germany?
| ratww wrote:
| It's not.
|
| The whole reason is historical, because of Chernobyl,
| Sellafield, the Fukushima. People have been wary for
| years. Netflix series Dark reflects this mindset pretty
| well.
|
| The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see
| repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it
| looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing
| about it. It will take a while for the population to
| change their mind, and longer still for the government.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see
| repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it
| looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing
| about it. It will take a while for the population to
| change their mind, and longer still for the government.
|
| German here. We Europeans also have another issue: _where
| to put the waste_. Unlike Americans who have lots of
| deserts where no one gives a flying f..k about anything
| you dump there because there is no human life in a
| hundred km range, Europe is densely populated and
| surprisingly people don 't want to live near a nuclear
| waste dump.
|
| Additionally, unlike Americans we have personal
| experience with nuclear disaster from Chernobyl - to this
| day, many decades after the event, you have to check wild
| pigs and fungi in Bavaria for radioactivity if you want
| to sell them. And current operators of nuclear plants
| haven't been exactly trustworthy, given many thousands of
| incident reports of which quite a number can be boiled
| down to shoddy construction or maintenance.
|
| On top of that, we have had _massive_ fuck-ups of our
| governments in the attempts to find a permanent storage
| site:
|
| - former salt mine "Asse" which was used from 1967-1978
| turned to be a colossal disaster - the barrels rusted and
| leaked, to make it worse it was _known_ at the time that
| the barrels would only last three years, and now it 's
| estimated to need billions of euros for retrieval of all
| the waste
|
| - former salt mine "Gorleben" was inspected from
| 1979-2000 as a permanent storage site, but (again) it
| came out that the location was chosen for political
| reasons, not scientific
|
| - former GDR site "Morsleben" is unstable, needing
| billions of euros to prevent collapse
|
| - current projects to search a new final site are
| expecting to take until (at least) 2031 with finalization
| of storage in year 2095-2170 (!!!), at a total cost of
| 50-170 billion euros.
|
| As a result of all of this - especially the last point,
| who can even guarantee there will be a German nation in
| over 150 years of time from now?! - German public is
| extremely skeptic of nuclear energy.
|
| In other European nations, French and British projects
| for new nuclear reactors (Flamanville and Hinkley Point
| C, respectively) have managed to surpass the infamous
| disaster airport BER in budget and time overruns. Even if
| there were public support for nuclear energy, no one
| trusts government to complete such projects in time and
| budget anymore, further weakening nuclear energy.
|
| Edit: Totally forgot about the _boatload_ of issues
| involving power plants europe-wide, see e.g.
| https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-
| nucl... for a list. You really have anything there, from
| fundamental construction issues over your run-off-the-
| mill accident and old age (many plants are 30 years or
| older) to outright gross negligence. To put it short: We
| Europeans can't operate nuclear power responsibly, no
| matter if organized under capitalist, communist or
| modern-ish government control.
|
| There won't be much of a future for nuclear fission power
| in Europe, no matter what some of our bought-off leaders
| (Macron, Orban) spout.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| The problem is German insane requirement of "permament"
| solution. Sure, the biggest problem here is what will
| happen 10000 years from now with waste that could easily
| be repackaged; instead, let's kill the planet in the next
| 100 years.
|
| >In other European nations, French and British projects
| for new nuclear reactors (Flamanville and Hinkley Point
| C, respectively) have managed to surpass the infamous
| disaster airport BER in budget and time overruns.
|
| China has managed to build reactors using same EPR design
| on time.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| German people demand a safe permanent solution simply
| because time has shown over and over again that nothing
| is as permanent as an unsafe "temporary" solution that
| ends up being permanent because of inertia, budget cuts,
| insolvencies or whatever.
|
| It's the same as with tech debt, with the difference that
| your average startup's tech debt can't be turned into a
| dirty bomb by flying an airplane into it.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| And nothing is as expensive and company-killing than
| complete tech stack switch and rewrite of all software.
|
| >unsafe "temporary" solution
|
| There's nothing unsafe in this particular temporary
| solution. It's the other way, if something leaks, you can
| relatively easily fix it. It's only problem if you bury
| leaking stuff underground.
|
| Also, proper solution is to use "waste" in breeder
| reactors, which only problem is political opposition to
| them.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| You have two choices:
|
| 1) Store the stuff above ground => risk terrorism,
| sabotage and "normal" accidents (e.g. lighting strike,
| earthquakes, corrosion leading to leaks), additionally:
| _no one wants to live next to a nuclear dump_ so you won
| 't get political support but rather fierce backlash from
| the people living near the chosen site
|
| 2) Store the stuff under ground => risk of collapse, of
| leaks and other issues as have already happened in the
| existing attempts
|
| > Also, proper solution is to use "waste" in breeder
| reactors, which only problem is political opposition to
| them.
|
| Breeder reactors IIRC have the problem of plutonium
| proliferation, molten-salt reactors aren't even close to
| being developed enough to be put into production.
| kvgr wrote:
| Todays nuclear waste is futures gold... i would be happy
| to buy all the waste. In the future it will be burned in
| next gen reactors. What now seems crazy will be reality
| in couple of decades.
| m4rtink wrote:
| It is in part literally gold and other heavier elements
| due to all the transmutation going on due to neutron
| bombardment in the reactor core. :)
|
| It's just not yet economical to extract it out of the
| spent fuel for use.
| shawnz wrote:
| The waste is the biggest advantage of nuclear. Consider
| that when you burn hydrocarbons, you produce waste, too.
| And much of that waste is simply dumped into the air
| where we all breathe it.
|
| You might say, well, hydrocarbon waste is much less
| dangerous. But that's negated by the fact that you need
| about 1,000,000x as much coal to replace the energy
| provided by nuclear. And in fact, the total amount of
| radioactive contaminants in that quantity of coal is
| roughly equal to the amount of nuclear fuel you would
| have required in the first place had you just used
| nuclear alone!
| alexgmcm wrote:
| Also with burner reactors you can use the "waste" as
| fuel.
|
| The problem is largely a political one.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Also with burner reactors you can use the "waste" as
| fuel.
|
| As far as I know using the waste as fuel is only possible
| in new reactor types, which are still under development -
| and in the case of molten salt reactors, it's not even
| sure yet if these actually can be built because of
| material science issues (aka, how to construct piping
| that stays durable for decades when exposed to hot,
| aggressive molten salt).
|
| It is simply not fair towards future generations to
| literally dump _even more_ waste to them and hope they
| manage to figure it out, when we could alternatively also
| build out the European power grid and go fully renewable
| using wind, solar and ocean /rivers for generation,
| batteries and hydro for storage and natural gas/hydrogen
| for peak demand.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Counterpoint: If we cannot switch to those other kinds of
| renewables in a reasonable amount of time compared to
| Nuclear, we're leaving them with a way bigger clusterfuck
| in the form of runaway greenhouse gas driven global
| warming.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Germany managed to get from 6% renewables in the energy
| mix in 2000 to 46% in 2020.
|
| It is not impossible to get even faster buildout in the
| next ten years, all we need is politicians deciding to do
| so instead of giving billion dollar handouts to fossil
| fuel companies and actively impeding buildout!
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Doesn't look like based on the graph in the top level
| comment of this post that made much of a difference at
| all.
| LoupSolitaire wrote:
| > We Europeans also have another issue: where to put the
| waste
|
| We do not actually have that kind of issue, nuclear waste
| takes very little storage space.
| 988747 wrote:
| The obvious solution seems to be to ship the waste to the
| US, paying them for the disposal. Or you can sign a deal
| with some North African countries (Libya, Tunisia), and
| have them store the dump in Sahara.
| barney54 wrote:
| My reading of the situation is that Merkel went anti-nuke
| because the greens in Germany were anti-nuke and she
| needed more support. It was all about electoral politics.
| tremon wrote:
| Being anti-nuke and being against nuclear power are two
| completely different things.
| schroeding wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. IMHO, one of the major reasons
| Germany (beyond party lines) went anti-nuclear after
| Fukushima was the sentiment that "something like
| Tschernobyl can only happen in countries like the Soviet
| Union / the eastern block", that was the political
| position of most parties (except Greens, of course) since
| the 80s. The West German nuclear plants were "always
| safe", something like Tschernobyl "could never happen
| here". This sentiment was a major part of the reason why
| the East German nuclear plants were shut down immediately
| after the collapse of East Germany, even before the
| Unification. They were Soviet and unsafe.
|
| But Fukushima is in Japan, and Japan and Germany feel
| much more similar, from a technological standpoint, than
| (West) Germany and the ex Soviet Union. Even though
| Fukushima was geographically much farther away than
| Tschernobyl, it somehow was "closer", politically.
|
| "If it happens in Japan, it can happen here, too" - I
| know a few people that regularly vote / support the CDU
| (Merkels party) and most of them had this exact change of
| mind.
| throwawayzRUU6f wrote:
| The question is - why did this trend arise specifically
| in German-speaking countries?
|
| Chernobyl/Pripyat is in northern Ukraine, on the border
| with Belarus.
|
| Ukraine is totally fine with nuclear power. Belarus plans
| to expand the existing plants. To the west, Slovakia's
| grid is mostly nuclear and is currently doing finishing
| touches on their new reactors. Hungary is also pro-
| nuclear.
|
| The radioactive plume from Chernobyl then moved
| northwards, towards Baltics, reaching the populated parts
| of Scandinavia. Well, the grids in FIN and SWE are
| heavily nuclear-based, Finland is about to launch another
| 1500MW reactor.
|
| So - the countries most affected by the Chernobyl
| disaster are unanimously pro-nuclear, while DACH
| countries, basically unaffected by it, are somehow in
| panic-mode whenever the word 'nuclear' is uttered.
| drran wrote:
| Ukraine was against nuclear power and nuclear weapons
| until war. Now, we need to have an ability to quickly
| produce few plutonium nukes in case of emergency, so we
| need weapon grade nuclear reactors to produce nuclear
| waste with plutonium.
| schroeding wrote:
| I don't think "unaffected" is the right term. Yes, DACH
| didn't get much radiation in median, but in some areas
| (mostly Bavaria[1] and Austria[2]) there was quite a bit
| of radioactive rain. For example, its still not allowed
| to eat wild boars / deers in parts of Bavaria, because
| they accumulated too much (> 10k Bq/Kg) radiation, mostly
| Caesium 137 from the Tschernobyl incident.
|
| Also, Austria did reject nuclear power in the 70s, before
| Tschernobyl, with one power plant (Zwentendorf[3])
| already built but not yet running, via a _very_ close
| referendum. So the anti-nuclear sentiment was already
| partly there (in Austria more than in Germany), but its
| very probable that Tschernobyl (and Fukushima) pushed
| enough people "over the edge" to give the anti-nuclear
| sentiment a comfy political majority across almost all
| political parties.
|
| Why the other countries did not follow this trend, I
| don't know. They'll have their reasons :-)
|
| [1] https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Bilder/BfS/DE/ion/notfa
| llschut... [2] https://science.orf.at/stories/3206079/
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Pow
| er_Plan...
| fpoling wrote:
| The nuclear power plant in Belarus is a political project
| funded mostly by Russia to increase political ties with
| Belarus. It cannot be profitable without "free" money
| from Russia.
| legulere wrote:
| Germany manages to reduce fossil fuel use though: https://de.
| m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei%3AEn...
|
| (Personally I would have preferred to shut down coal first,
| but old nuclear plants are a risk and new ones are too
| expensive)
| tjbiddle wrote:
| Interesting. Looking at the same graph - especially when you
| tweak it to show only the last decade - you'll see solar is
| growing very quickly (25% YoY) while the others stay fairly
| stable. That would have it overtaking oil in 20 years.
|
| Considering we're going to see mass adoption of electric
| vehicles in the next 5-20 years I think that will happen even
| more quickly.
| gregwebs wrote:
| I want to point out that overtaking oil doesn't mean
| displacing it. History described in this chart predicts that
| the best we can hope for is that oil usage will very slowly
| decline like biomass or coal.
|
| I point this out not because I think this history must be our
| destiny, but instead to raise awareness that much more must
| be done to avoid that destiny.
| Aicy wrote:
| Only if you assume that the growth is expoential /
| compounding.
|
| I don't know much about the field, but given the vast
| investments and land needed for country level solar projects
| I would argue the growth rate is much more likely to be
| linear, in which case it looks like it won't be overtaking
| oil this century.
|
| It's relatively easy to make large percentage gains when the
| current amount is so small.
| gregwebs wrote:
| Solar already hit a supply shock this year that has
| increased the cost of installation (it has been reliably
| going down before this). Solar growth is expected to be
| closer to just linear this year. I hope this is temporary
| due to all the supply shocks going on right now.
|
| Looking longer-term there will be growth slow-down when
| wind/solar reaches a larger scale due to the intermittent
| nature of the energy unless we can figure out how to deal
| with this. Currently dealing with it requires lots of gas
| peaker plants, hydro (which has its own environmental
| damages) or batteries (the resources required to produce
| and continually replace these are not sustainable but
| hopefully the net carbon emission can stay low). Malaysia
| recently had to stop incentivizing solar because their grid
| couldn't handle it.
| pfdietz wrote:
| There was a similar price shock back around 2010 (?) due
| to polysilicon shortage. After the hand wringing about
| how the learning curve was over, capacity increased, and
| prices continued downward, making up for lost time.
| stragio wrote:
| Why it's going to be hard to go for green energy:
|
| https://braveneweurope.com/alf-hornborg-a-globalised-solar-p...
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| Is this why we still use whale fat? Idiot.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Humans never willingly decrease their footprint. Even
| technology that is supposed to "save money" won't be used to
| decrease overall footprint. People want to save money so they
| can get more in other areas. Technology that simply reduces
| overall footprint doesn't sell. Technology will not save us.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Counter point: In Germany we are moving from heating
| generated from coal and oil to heat generated by heat pumps.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Which is largely driven by government regulation. This is
| not people doing it willingly just for the sake of reducing
| consumption. Governments have the power to do things like
| this. But even then, it remains to be seen if this will
| actually reduce overall energy usage. It could simply mean
| people keep their houses warmer/cooler all year round and
| energy usage stays the same. Or the "saved" energy merely
| gets diverted to some other use.
| EcoMonkey wrote:
| This is a primary reason that we need a carbon tax. Building
| out renewables and stopping there will just make energy cheaper
| and induce demand. A carbon tax will actually change the energy
| mix by making carbon-intensive energy sources more expensive
| relative to less carbon-intensive sources.
|
| Speaking of visual reality checks, check out En-ROADS, which
| was built in collaboration with MIT to simulate different
| policy interventions. Check out the carbon price slider
| compared to everything else: https://en-
| roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7....
|
| My favorite thing to do with the money from a carbon tax is to
| just give it back to everyone as equal dividends, to offset any
| regressive effects of the carbon tax without creating tons of
| loopholes with another more complex disbursement scheme. This
| is called carbon fee and dividend.
|
| The IPCC finds with high confidence that we need a high price
| on carbon to stay under 1.5C. PDF warning:
| https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SR15...
|
| A policy framework without a carbon tax is not serious about
| getting emissions down.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I guess the graph ends somewhere and my guess is we largely
| stop using energy during the coming nuclear winter.
| valprop1 wrote:
| This short 30 second video on YouTube shows how average
| temperature increased globally since 1880. The irony to me is
| that every nation is witnessing negative impacts of global
| warming and climate change and yet we chose to do so little.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsX4qHgDlZM
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| It's simple. Fossil fuels work, are absolutely reliable and they
| make the world spin. Renewables, for all their vast potential, do
| not. And at the end of the day, the major world decisions are
| made based more on financial interests then on social/political
| ones. That's why i believe that following global trade and
| markets will give you a more reliable outlook on the world than
| following News sites.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Your thinking is an exacting demonstration of the short-
| sightedness that is about to render our species extinct.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| > about to render our species extinct
|
| Cut down on food wasting. Actually, why not cut down on all
| wastage, i think almost unbelievable gains will be rapidly
| made against poverty and towards the environment.
| ganzuul wrote:
| To do that we need to put an end to market capitalism in
| favor of planned economy. Apparently Walmart has a model
| that works at the required scale.
| williesleg wrote:
| Dino juice.
| tejohnso wrote:
| Of these G7 nations, France, Italy, Canada, and Japan have all
| nationally declared a climate _emergency_.
| [deleted]
| dehrmann wrote:
| If there was a lesson from covid, it's that governments need to
| step in where markets fail--markets aren't interested in
| maintaining a strategic n95 mask (or oil) stockpile. Government
| subsidies on fossil fuels, like subsidies on food production,
| should be seen as "buying" stability and resiliency. This doesn't
| mean green energy shouldn't be subsidized at more dollars per
| watt (or mile) than oil, just that oil subsidies still have a
| role.
| toomuchredbull wrote:
| As a Canadian, even I am surprised by how shallow the rhetoric of
| our PM is in terms of "building back better" and green future. He
| basically helicoptered an insane amount of money on the
| population for rampant consumerism and bailed out companies
| indiscriminately whereas built basically no transit, no green
| infrastructure whatsoever.
| tekstar wrote:
| Our PM also walks behind the US and reiterates whatever climate
| target they state, like X % by 2030 and y % by 2050. I have
| seen exactly 0 plan on how to get there. I suspect he'll retire
| in 2029.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Mostly carbon taxes, infrastructure investments, and small
| things like subsidizing electric cars (5k$), countered
| unfortunately by supporting pipeline constructions for
| Alberta.
|
| So for example, the federal is funding the suburban train
| system in Montreal, and the tramway in Quebec City. Those
| projects will have a huge impact. And the federal will not
| fund the absurd proposed 10 G$ tunnel that Quebec wants to
| build.
|
| Trudeau uses the excuse that "infrastructure programs do not
| fund roads, only public transport, it's not my fault if I
| don't want to support the program", but that's how it works:
| the federal mainly proposes policies that meet certain
| targets, and then provinces get funding in exchange for
| implementing those changes.
| tekstar wrote:
| Do you think those policies are anywhere on the scale
| necessary to meet the climate change goals he has set out?
| premium-komodo wrote:
| When Trudeau repeated the WEF jargon "build back better", he
| was just signaling that he's on board to support the plans of
| German Bond-villain Klaus Schwab. I think once you understand
| that, you stop being surprised if he seems to lacks principle
| in some other area.
| alfl wrote:
| Fellow Canadian, and can confirm: current Federal regime is all
| hat no cattle.
| RileyJames wrote:
| You don't say ey, the situation is approximately exactly the
| same here in Australia. In fact, 'gas lead recovery' is the
| closest we have a to 'building back better'.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| > He basically helicoptered an insane amount of money on the
| population for rampant consumerism.
|
| I take no issue with this. Keynes is right you need to prop
| back up aggregate demand, and keep people fed.
|
| > bailed out companies indiscriminately whereas built basically
| no transit, no green infrastructure whatsoever.
|
| That's the bad part. The demand-side stimulus should be
| indiscriminate because the supply-side policy should be
| extremely targeted. People buy whatever the good deal is, like
| an electric field pulls hardest on the stuff with the most
| charge. Its essential to to puppeteer the supply side so the
| environmentally good things are the good deals.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| From my limited knowledge in the field, "traditional" nuclear
| power plants are usually very likely to incur in cost overruns (a
| recent example being [0]), supplemental to an already significant
| expense and a very long term investment that most politicians do
| not seem to be very fond of. In the past few decades modular,
| entirely self-contained and passively safe designs have been
| often in discussion as more and more systems are devised, but I
| don't feel much interest towards a mass adoption to at the very
| least represent a fraction of the current worldwide power
| generation (above the tiny percentage nuclear sits on at the
| moment). Is it merely a matter of economics and ineffectivenes of
| the price/lifetime power generation, compared to more traditional
| systems? It's not as if other nuclear concepts cannot also take
| advantage of a good portion of spent fuel--that so far has been
| of significant concern and only one project seems will be
| successful at in the short-future [1]--such as traveling wave
| reactors, or breeder designs in general (I do understand most of
| the research and real-life applications have been less than
| effective). Due to continuous power generation couldn't such
| systems also reduce the need for the much dreaded fossil backup,
| assuming sufficient capacities?
|
| [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-09/edf-
| lifts...
|
| [1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/finlands-spent-fuel-
| rep...
| Frost1x wrote:
| >nuclear power plants are usually very likely to incur in cost
| overruns (a recent example being [0]), supplemental to an
| already significant expense and a very long term investment
| that most politicians do not seem to be very fond of.
|
| I'd be interested to see a good fair accounting of all the
| externalized costs non-nuclear energy is able to pass off.
| Global warming is clearly one of them. The thing about nuclear
| energy is that danger and risk is inherently concentrated, so
| externalizing these costs isn't really an option. You can't go
| pouring spent fissile waste into the air and pouring buckets
| into the ocean (unless you're Japan, apparently). People have
| seen the dangers with Chernobyl and the like. People know
| enough to know it's dangerous stuff they can't take care of
| themselves.
|
| If you have an oil spill, well it's nasty but people are
| familiar with oils in their engine, natural gas, gasoline, ash,
| and all that. People kind of understand it and know a little
| bit of exposure typically won't kill them. You can pour motor
| oil on your hand and you're _mostly_ going to be just fine (do
| it a lot and often and maybe not).
|
| Pour fissile waste material over your hand and depending on
| radiation, you might die just by getting close or get cancer
| from short term exposure. People see the danger and you can't
| externalize that. Other materials you can sort of shrug off
| because long term effects you can get away with externalizing
| in our society. Let consumers, governments, and others pickup
| all the debt you're generating that no one is accounting.
|
| So I think we need real fair cost assessments before we can
| handwaive away which energy sources are costly and understand
| the variance in these types of costs, especially if we're going
| to live in this world where economics and utilitarianism seems
| to rule the world.
| uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh wrote:
| Solar panels will use up all the sun and then the plants will die
| whatever1 wrote:
| Here we go again. If we do not fix the demand side of the
| problem, the supply will be there for us, regardless of how much
| we try to penalize the western oil companies.
|
| To fix the demand side we need technological advances and help
| from regulation. BUT. Regulation itself cannot solve the problem.
| That is the elephant in the room. Regulations come and go, and
| they are bound by borders, but once a technology has been
| discovered there is no going back.
|
| Tesla's 250 mile car and charging network in 2010 was the reason
| that gasoline will die in the US, not the 7k tax incentive on a
| 60k car.
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